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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26275438">Controlled Burn</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigersilver/pseuds/tigersilver'>tigersilver</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>2011 HDS Beltane Fest, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, And I really do mean Slow Burn, Angst, Beltane Rituals, Consensual Infidelity, Consensual Underage Sex, Established Relationship, Established Relationship but maybe not the way you expect, F/M, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Harry Potter Next Generation, Infidelity, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Potions, RST, Slow Burn, Snark, Temporarily Unrequited Love, True Love, UST, fidelity, flangst, many feels</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:08:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>40,749</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26275438</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigersilver/pseuds/tigersilver</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Deceased Professor Severus Snape had always claimed he could ‘stopper death itself’ with his skill at Potions. What he did not make generally known to his young students was that a Potion could accomplish so much more than merely halt the Grim Reaper. In the proper circumstances, that is, and with the correct motivators, Time itself could be altered. Invoking the ancient Beltane Magic, a bewildering variety of ingredients, Snape’s most private jottings and his sage, acerbic counsel (albeit portrait-purveyed), Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy (singly and together) attempt to set to rights a massive wrong—a rift in the very temporal fabric—that only they perceive clearly…and perhaps not always as clearly as all that, either. Their joint efforts have/will/might, could and can remould the very foundations of their lives and the lives of others. And, if Janus should smile, they will succeed.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Original Header/Summary/Warnings</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>Title: </b>Controlled Burn<br/><b>To: </b><span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://sugareey.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://sugareey.livejournal.com/"><b>sugareey</b></a></span><br/><b>Author:</b> <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://tigersilver.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://tigersilver.livejournal.com/"><b>tigersilver</b></a></span><br/><b>Pairing/Threesome: </b>H/D<br/><b>Rating: </b>NC-17<br/><b>Warnings: </b>* AU &amp; EWE. Time travel, in a sense. Rough sex (<em>not</em> dubcon or noncon); quasi-underaged relations; flangst. Implied het; inclusion of NextGen characters.*<br/><b>Story notes:</b> This tale is literally in pieces. I hope the reader will forgive me, but I’m humbly asking that he/she concocts it, as he/she goes along. Discard the parts you dislike and retain the bits you wish, if you please. It is a jumble sale of a fic; a Chinese takeaway menu. Still, I believe all the essentials are present: the ingredients needed for this Potion (if you’ll forgive the fancy), and the proper preparations provided for self-ignition of the conflagration that powers Snape’s most ingenious recipe yet. To provide some relief, fair Reader, I’ve based the action loosely on the Dave Carter song ‘Tanglewood Tree’…but not reliably. Beta’d and coded by my lovely, forgiving, endlessly patient Dream Team: <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://demicus.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://demicus.livejournal.com/"><b>demicus</b></a></span>, <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://lonerofthepack.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://lonerofthepack.livejournal.com/"><b>lonerofthepack</b></a></span> and <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://megyal.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://megyal.livejournal.com/"><b>megyal</b></a></span>. Additional much-needed assistance provided by the incomparable <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://groolover.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://groolover.livejournal.com/"><b>groolover</b></a></span> and the marvellous <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://altri-uccelli.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://altri-uccelli.livejournal.com/"><b>altri_uccelli</b></a></span>. All further errors are mine own and I claim them proudly.<br/><b>Word count:</b> 40,000+/-<br/><b>Summary: </b>Deceased Professor Severus Snape had always claimed he could ‘stopper death itself’ with his skill at Potions. What he did <em>not</em> make generally known to his young students was that a Potion could accomplish so much more than merely halt the Grim Reaper. In the proper circumstances, that is, and with the correct motivators, Time itself could be altered. Invoking the ancient Beltane Magic, a bewildering variety of ingredients, Snape’s most private jottings and his sage, acerbic counsel (albeit portrait-purveyed), Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy (singly and together) attempt to set to rights a massive wrong—a rift in the very temporal fabric—that only they perceive clearly…and perhaps not always as clearly as all that, either. Their joint efforts have/will/might, could and <em>can</em> remould the very foundations of their lives and the lives of others. And, if Janus should smile, they <em>will</em> succeed.<br/><b>Disclaimer:</b> Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.</p><p><b>Author's Note:</b> Dearest <span class="ljuser i-ljuser i-ljuser-type-P"><a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="https://sugareey.livejournal.com/profile"></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="https://sugareey.livejournal.com/"><b>sugareey</b></a></span>, I owe you a proper and very humble apology! I’ve had this Beltane concept in my head for ages now and all I wished was to have the opportunity to charge ahead and write the damned thing. Fortunately, the wonderful Mods were able to match us up, you and me, and I’m hoping that, although I’ve not given you all you asked for nor even a quarter of it, really, I did manage to include and incorporate at least a little of your particular Requirement. And not to worry! There is no Epilogue; really, there isn’t. I hope, too, that you’ll forgive me for practically eloping with this tale; I couldna’ help myself, I swear it, ‘pon book, bell and candlestick! As for everyone else who tackles this tangle, you’ll likely notice a few stray references to some fairly weighty H/D fanfic titles. You are not mistaken; this is deliberate. I (ahem) was being terribly clever. Please forgive!</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Part the First: A Vagrant Young Vine</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <br/>
  <a id="cutid1" name="cutid1"></a>
  <b>Controlled Burn</b>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <b>Part the First: A Vagrant Young Vine</b>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>Love is a tanglewood tree, in a bower of green<br/>In a forest at dawn<br/>Fair while the mockingbird sings, but she soon lifts her wings<br/>And the music is gone<br/>Young lovers in the tall grass, with their hearts open wide,<br/>When the red summer poppies bloom<br/>But, love is a trackless domain, and the rumor of rain<br/>In the late afternoon</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Meadow Grass</b></span><br/><br/>The long grass slope had the golden sheen of late afternoon sunlight hazing it. The light turned almost between blinks—Scottish autumn days did not linger when it came time for the close—and painted the glossy green whispers bloody red in patches. The outcropping jutting just above hid an oval-shaped grass and moss-lined hollow, a shallow indentation worn into the hill, as if a giant’s forefinger had rubbed there; it had offered concealment even from the wonky-sighted Divination professor, once.<br/><br/>There, it had been. There, and that especial day had been warmer by a scant few degrees, as then it had been spring…but not by much. The blades then had been a fresher hue; insects had buzzed, dotting the slope with glints of paper-thin brilliant wings and polished carapaces, going from flower to flower, tussock to miniature gulley.<br/><br/>There, and all he’d seen – been capable of seeing – had been the dazzle of sun and the black shadow of robed shoulders like flexing wings above him, the grip of pale, taut fingers on his hips and waist…and that familiar mad slash of white snarl and ice-gold flying.<br/><br/>There, he’d surrendered willingly, pants hanging off a passion-twisting ankle and toes curled with rough pleasure, and the cock within him and the demented eyes that spoke volumes and the jerky to-and-fro, in time with wind and as erratic—there, he had been his happiest. His apogee, and Draco’s, the moment they’d cried out together, Draco’s head tilted far back on a stem of strong, flexing throat, the noise that escaped him not even human. He, eyes wide open, thirsty for all of it; all he could take to him and all that could be given, all that filled him to the brim and flowed over in torrents.<br/><br/>And the green hissing ribbons of meadow grass were like a balm to the wounds of the coming war, and the thick, salted come that filled him was liquid hope, and there was no tomorrow. There was only the here and the now and the constant wind off the Lake blowing Draco’s garbled desires straight into Harry’s young lungs, inflating and elating. Breathing fancies and hidden wishes and the humid, sour-sweet air of shared kisses.<br/><br/>He remembered his lips had been swollen for hours after; he’d been forced to spell them for concealment’s sake.<br/><br/>"What’s Dad doing out there, just standing?" Albus wanted to know. He jogged his elder brother with an elbow. Trelawney’s Tower faced down upon a long, slanted lea, with the Lake lapping catty-cornered and the Forest a lurking black-green shadow marking the further boundary. "Why’s he here? He didn’t say he was coming to Hogwarts, did he?"<br/><br/>Harry Potter, Auror, was indeed present at Hogwarts, standing still and quiet, his attention clearly fixed on the far distant vista. From the vantage point of the Tower his two sons could make out the glint of washed-out sunshine reflecting off polished spectacle lenses.<br/><br/>"Dunno," James replied. He was unusually thoughtful, Al could tell, but he wasn’t being forthcoming…if he even knew anything more than Al did. "Here to visit us, maybe?"<br/><br/>"Prat. Makes no sense, that," Albus, being Slytherin, scoffed, even though he still looked up to James with a minor species of hero-worship. "It’s Wednesday, arse. He never comes on a Wednesday—and it’s not Hogsmeade weekend, this one. Not for ages."<br/><br/>"Auror business, then," James shrugged. "You’re so curious, squirt, you go ask him."<br/><br/>"…No," Al decided, and took the next step upwards, leaving the unexpected view of his father behind with a hurried flourish of school robes. Gryffs and Slyths still shared some Electives and the old bat McGonagall had instituted cross-ages classes for the higher Years, theorizing that NEWT and OWLS revision would both benefit from peer tutoring. Astrology, being a soft science, was one of those selected. "Leave it; 's’not important," he announced. When James didn’t instantly follow, Al spun back, impatient. "Come <em>on</em>, git—shake a leg, will you? Scorp’s saving us seats!"<br/><br/>"...Coming. Keep your hair on, I’m coming."<br/><br/>Harry had howled that exact same phrase, once. To the crushed grass beneath his spine, to the triumphant grin Draco wore like a bloody banner, to the world spread out like some giant Marauder’s Map before them—but still uncharted. Undefined by dark bold lines that weren’t meant to be crossed over, ever.<br/><br/>Joyous. Entranced. In the forgiving bosom on Mother Earth, they’d rutted, two young animals, blond and black-pelted. Young things, romping.<br/><br/><em>There</em>, in the grasses, just <em>there</em>—two boys had once known something like happiness. <em>Happy</em>. Such a bland, innocuous word for all they’d risked, that. Feeble. They’d not have ever called it that, for fear of ridicule, but they’d welcomed it still, being a step away from childhood.<br/><br/>No wonder it had failed them, then, in the bitter end. No wonder the promise had been empty. Too simple.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Crow’s Feather</b></span><br/><br/>"So. You’ve found it, then, Potter."<br/><br/>The voice was as acrid dry and rich withal as he remembered, figgy-pudding crumbling into a treacly puddle. Severus Snape looked down upon his old student from his place of pride over the hearth mantel, patronizing as always. "Riffling through my things again, I see. Cheeky."<br/><br/>Harry shrugged a careless shoulder; he was used to this.<br/><br/>"Huh. You gave permission, Professor, when you left me them. This, in particular. Whose fault, then?"<br/><br/>"Pah. You should’ve had that memorized already, Potter—should have no need to consult it—that was a lifetime ago."<br/><br/>"Yes," Harry looked up to meet Snape’s snapping black eyes with a furious gleam in his own. "That’s the problem in a nutshell, Snape. And you know it."<br/><br/>There was silence, abruptly. Because of course Snape had engineered this exact result most deliberately, shocking them all with his various bequests. Snape never lifted a finger without at least three reasons for it, even in the afterlife, and two of them Slytherin-hidden. Harry, intent, continued scanning the pages of the book on his knee. It was elderly in years and apparently had not been well-loved: a used Potions text, with detailed notes from an enterprising student decorating it. He’d been afraid of it once; had let himself be convinced it would cause harm—no more. Aurors had taught him that it was not the curse or Potion nor hex that damaged, it was the Wizard.<br/><br/>Eventually Snape nodded faint acknowledgement of his possibly grievous tactical error in willing that Potter a single blasted thing, much less this telling glimpse into his fine and creative thinking, but, not surprisingly, he skipped over any actual form of apology. An armed truce had come to work well for them, post-war.<br/><br/>Harry, not expecting anything like, made no comment. He’d been busily pondering a different topic altogether. It led to grimacing and a bout of internal musing, as it almost always did. He heaved an impatient sigh after a while, shutting the tatty pages on a finger to keep his place, and sipping at his postprandial shot of Firewhisky meditatively. The fire crackled on, oblivious.<br/><br/>Snape raised his eyebrows blandly, covertly observing his old charge for signs of imminent outburst, but Potter only opened the book again to his saved place, a determined grimace settling upon his face, shoulders squared against the tufted squabs of his armchair. "Right, right," he muttered. Snape refrained from replying—Potter often babbled to himself when he was swotting and Snape had grown accustomed to the soft murmurings. It wasn’t until another long silence had played out that Harry spoke again, and still softly, perhaps speaking only to himself as his stare was blank and empty—as if he were alone in the room. It happened that way, often enough; Snape, preoccupied or about some arcane business of his own, would go off to visit his other portraits, scattered now over the landscape of England. He seldom spoke of these visits but, when he did, Harry had always learnt something useful.<br/><br/>"I’d no idea, you know?" Harry kept his eyes fixed on the list of ingredients for the moment, though his chin rose. It was a lengthy Potions recipe and there were many caveats as to the condition of the items and methods in which they’d been collected. Notes populated all the available space in the deep margins, scribbled away in tiny, tiny curling script, flowing from a quill long dry, he was certain. The young Snape had not been indulged with Never-Ending<sup>™</sup> Inked ones, as other, more fortunate students had. "That you’d gone so very deep into this, Professor; that <em>far</em>—"<br/><br/>"It was the least I could do, Potter," Snape replied hastily. He knew more than enough not to ask of Harry to what Potion he referred. "The very least. And it was…fitting. I owed her that."<br/><br/>"Yes," Harry agreed, his eyes moist behind his lenses. "Yes, it was, Snape. Thank you. I know I say it every time but…thank you."<br/><br/>Harry’s old Potions Master only cleared his throat, shifting impatiently in his painted armchair. Harry had learnt he was not at all pleasant nor easy to deal with when asked hard questions: Why did you save me? Was it only ever my Mum you loved? What’s with that locket you’ve left me? Whose hair is it that’s black, Snape—your mother’s?<br/><br/>Why did you not say something—<em>anything</em>—sooner? This could’ve been avoided. Mitigated, at least—you’d have been alive now, Snape!<br/><br/>Harry had raged at one point in time, shortly after his bequest was delivered, his furious confusion bubbling over like lye soap in an overheated cauldron; Snape only departed his elaborately carved frame for calmer climes, unperturbed. Eventually, Harry had learnt to rein in his impetuous mouth. And slowly, ever so slowly, his inner image of Severus Snape had resolved to quite a different one.<br/><br/>Snape had indeed stymied Death. For one single moment, fleeting, and only to provide surcease from wicked agony. It had been his overweening goal and he’d succeeded, and Lily Evan’s retake on her very last second on this mortal coil had been pain-free and—clear-headed, and—startlingly <em>alive</em>.<br/><br/>Because of that, there’d been Love enough to shield baby Harry. A paradox, necessarily. A paradox, <em>created</em>. A Potion to alter time itself, defacto.<br/><br/>A silence fell upon the room, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable descent. The hearth crackled merry with ash and oak and mulberry; the spring rain pattered companionably on the window panes. Parchment whispered, lofting and falling gently in the cozy quiet.<br/><br/>What mischief had been managed once, could be so again. Snape had never once failed to deliver excellent results in Potions.<br/><br/>"So, er," the man himself remarked eventually, after the sole breathing occupant of the study had turned a few more pages, peering closely at the writing and apparently completely absorbed. "I assume you’ll be following in my illustrious footsteps, then? Potter?"<br/><br/>Harry’s head snapped up; his gaze challenging.<br/><br/>Snape sneered; paint and daub only enhanced his ability to do so. The sneer could linger longer on a face immortalized thusly.<br/><br/>"I’ve turned Time itself, Potter. I know <em>you</em>; don’t doubt that I do. You’ve plans, Potter—some mad scheme is ticking away in that maggoty mess you dare call a brain."<br/><br/>"Why ever would you assume <em>that</em>, Professor Snape?" Harry snorted, shifting his crossed legs under the Half-Blood Prince’s book. As Headmaster, it seemed, Snape had known exactly what had been done with it by two young Gryffindors long ago, and had retrieved it intact from the Room well before the fateful Fiendfyre.<br/><br/>"Cheeky!"<br/><br/>As a young man, a boy, he’d been fast friends with an irrepressibly clever Witch, Lily Evans. It was safe to say he knew her child, Harry Potter, very well indeed, if only from inference and observation.<br/><br/>"Besides," Snape shifted as well, smoothing down his robes and grimacing…it had taken Harry several years of enforced proximity to sort out that that particular twist to those thin lips was, in fact, a species of Snape-ish smile. "I know you want to, Potter. It’s written all over you. Idiot boy."<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Rue</b></span><br/><br/>The Ministry for Magic, rebuilt, was a rabbit warren, worse than ever before. For some, though, it was far more secure. No more would the edifice of Wizarding law and order be easily penetrable by any passing Hogwarts student with a will and a way and some Polyjuice Potion to spare. But then…there was no need for that, was there?<br/><br/>Kingsley Shacklebolt believed in transparency. No more, either, would the doings of the Ministry be shrouded in darkness and intrigue. Every employee was subjected to a most rigorous hiring process; even the venerable Wizengamot had been revamped to reflect the New Order.<br/><br/>There would not be tolerated, however, slip-shod slip-sliding into ethical quagmires on the part of the people in charge of Wizarding government. Accountability, responsibility and integrity were the key words of the day. And even a Death Eater could be deserving of forgiveness…and employment.<br/><br/>That was perhaps the most important act Harry Potter had ever accomplished. When Voldemort died, so had died a whole grubby, thorny, muddy bracken of disreputable underbrush layers, the petty evils that thrived in the shade of his evil. As a tree falling in the forest brings along others with it—the weak and the shallow-rooted—so ended a generation of apathy: that miserable soul-killer, responsible for more death and misery than any evil Dark Lord had ever conceived of.<br/><br/>Tom Riddle had been the condensing prism, the focusing lens of the accumulated apathy of Wizarding ages, the distillated, concentrated result of eons of careless cruelties and fractured ethics. Harry Potter shattered that distorted lens and broke the illusion permanently. Kingsley Shacklebolt had made it his life’s mission to keep the air clear of the fug of pointless hatreds, of small misunderstandings. Still, the new Ministry was designed for its residents protection. It was a fortress, built even to resist fifth columns. If one wished to be safe, if one required privacy, one chose the Ministry as a haven.<br/><br/>The Ministry corridor was thus endless and dull. When Draco Malfoy emerged from his meeting with Kingsley Shacklebolt, he turned by the discreetly nondescript door that led to the Minister’s office and sagged against it. Jerked his chin up instantly, for there was Harry Potter, iconic Hero, striding along with a swish and flare of scarlet-blood Auror robes, the gleam of black knee-length boots and shiny brass buttons. Harry Potter: still scarred, still with that hair, still with those much-mended specs obscuring his face.<br/><br/>No…not hiding eyes old before their time, those re-bent black frames…instead, turning the world back upon itself, rather. Fending it off with the opacity of carven, polished jade, reflecting through refraction.<br/><br/>Harry Potter. Two words, one man: engraven indelibly upon every cell in Draco Malfoy’s person, from cock to earlobes to lips to the harried muscle beating bluntly behind his ribcage.<br/><br/>Four years gone already, so the broad shoulders outlined under the cape were more than understandable. An Auror, so the closely outlined thighs and calves that Draco caught glimpses of beneath the quiet, but efficiently determined flap of uniform garb were entirely feasible. A married man, so the golden band on one finger was perfectly sensible.<br/><br/>A father. Of two, with another on the way. They desperately hoped for a little girl this time, or so the <em>Prophet</em> reported.<br/><br/>Direct gaze, never swerving; determined gait, never ceasing. With barely a ghost of a nod to acknowledge Draco’s presence, Harry Potter swept on past him, not missing a beat.<br/><br/>And did not notice—seemingly---the quick faltering hand extended involuntarily after him, nor hear the whispered hiss, barely an intake of a breath: the ‘Harry!’ that kissed the settling air currents of the narrow taupe-hued corridor and fell flat, deflated.<br/><br/>Deflected.<br/><br/><em>Did</em> not hear, <em>did</em> not see, <em>did</em> not wish. Did. Not. <em>Want</em>.<br/><br/>Draco, who’d tensed into the arc of a drawn bow, who had ceased aught else solely to stare hungrily after this one solitary figure, came undone in an infinitely slow process. Crack and pop went the spine, straightening; blood sizzled along his arteries, till one could imagine his very skin, steaming.<br/><br/>"I cannot."<br/><br/>He addressed the empty space where Potter had just been, with eyes fixed straight ahead, well-kept hands (excepting always the actual fingernails; nibbled) in lax fists at his sides, his measured pace solid and brisk. No stomping, no flurry; no swagger—not Harry. A thoughtful man, grown from a boy who’d had trouble controlling his strongest emotions. Potter, the very epitome of ‘hero’, emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of his past.<br/><br/>"I cannot!" he bit out, snapping teeth on it.<br/><br/>What Kingsley had just agreed to, reluctantly, was his golden opportunity; perhaps his last one. He’d lobbied for it, plotted for it and pulled in favour after favour. He would not waste it. And with a whirl of his own fine robes, his very best professional ones and carefully chosen to ‘convince the Minister this action is absolutely necessary, and don’t fret the expense’ robes, Draco Malfoy spun away from the stolid door at his back (his sole form of support during the whole of that endlessly long, soul-rending, solitary walk down that deserted corridor, when he-who’d-been-simply-‘Harry’-once did not a thing more than spare Draco Malfoy a terse nod of acknowledgement, same as he would any colleague in passing; when Harry Potter, Auror, had pinched his remembered lips just-so taut and kept his chin pointed firmly toward the end of the hallway, looming—the end of the line, literally, as it split into a T-intersection there; the acid rising in his throat had nearly swamped him)<br/><br/>…and fled the scene of his not-quite snubbing. For it would not stop him. Nothing would stop him, not now.<br/><br/>And <em>fled</em> back to his own Auror cubicle, with a fiery vengeance built and born of fury, fed on glum despair…waxed wroth to blazing by Potter’s bland dismissal.<br/><br/>It would <em>not</em> end this way. Draco wouldn’t have it. Snape would be his weapon; had even claimed he was willing to be so used. Dear Severus. Sworn to always protect him.<br/><br/>With a decided stomp of heel-toe and a glint in his grey eyes that betold woe to any who dared stay him, he went. Woe and rue, cried the muffled squeak of shoe on lino—and perhaps, as well, some collateral damage done to Malfoy’s carefully reconstructed reputation.<br/><br/>Not that he cared for <em>that</em>. Potter was in for a decided surprise, a change of circumstances that would be far-reaching.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Spice Tree Twigs, Shredded</b></span><br/><br/>"What in the bleeding fuck are you doing, Harry?"<br/><br/>"Something’s not right here. I’m fixing it."<br/><br/>"What isn’t right?" Draco was as demanding at forty as he’d been at twenty and at eleven, too. ‘Be my friend!’, ‘Be my enemy!’, ‘Make me your lover!’—‘Save me from him, Harry!’<br/><br/>Well…perhaps those exact words had never crossed Draco Malfoy’s lips; would never, either, but Harry had received the message, all the same. The issue was to sort it. Carefully. Again and again and again. Thus, the Beltane fire, the cauldron and the pile of ingredients Harry and Draco had dutifully toted out to a clearing in the Forbidden Forest.<br/><br/>And Snape. Explained him as well, that wretched nasty-wise git. Even only paint-and-daub, he was no teddy bear’s picnic.<br/><br/>"I thought we’d dealt with all that rubbish, Potter?" Harry was only ‘Potter’ when Draco was in a judging mood. Or when they were back in the corridors of Hogwarts, lending their services as guest faculty. Or…when he felt the need. "There shouldn’t be much more left to do. Minor adjustments only. It’s a recipe, Potter—not an experiment!"<br/><br/>"Mmm, but there is. I can feel it, Draco. Pass me that curvy dark stick there, would you?"<br/><br/>"This? This is pomegranate wood, Harry. I thought we used olive, last."<br/><br/>"And the other—the oak kindling. The smaller heap, not the large."<br/><br/>"Then you’ll be needing the holly and the honeysuckle, too. I wish you’d told me; I’d have brought along—"<br/><br/>"Didn’t realize, Draco, or I’d have been on it already. Hermione, Snape and I only mapped this out yesterday. You were in meetings all day long, Draco."<br/><br/>"Well… it had better work. M’not going through it again, Harry. And neither are you."<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Chamomile</b></span><br/><br/>"Fascinating." Hermione’s head nodded over the closely written pages. "I didn’t realize he’d taken his studies to this point. What an amazing man."<br/><br/>"I know," Harry nodded. Shook his head; sighed. He did know; Snape had no problem informing him of it—often.<br/><br/>"Thank you, Granger, for those kind words. I am so pleased to learn my competence astounds you," Snape, never quite polite, nodded his painted head, having glanced up from the painted tome he was perusing. Hermione didn’t even look up, she was so heavily involved with her reading. "I am now completely at peace in the hereafter."<br/><br/>Hermione giggled behind a palm, her face colouring prettily.<br/><br/>"Shut it, you," Harry chuckled, with a mix of reluctant fondness (who knew the constant sharp turn of word could actually grow on one, anyway?) and bloody-minded resignation. Snape, the buggering berk, had become as much a part of his daily life as Ginny had. And, gods forbid, the old crotchety codger had proved infinitely more amusing. "I know you now, Snape; bloody twat. Don’t forget I’m afflicted with you in perpetuum." Hermione did giggle at that sally, all the while turning a crumble-edge page of lined parchment and scribbling down yet another item on her partial list of ingredients.<br/><br/>"Aren’t we all, Harry?" she smiled. She spared a sly smile to the portrait of Snape. "Oh, no offense, Professor."<br/><br/>Snape harrumphed, lips tight over some illegible text.<br/><br/>Harry grinned at the both of them, but the question still burnt. He needed answers. Stat-now-yesterdays ago. "Right—so, question is, Hermione—can we replicate it?" He turned to fully face the portrait of a younger Snape in his brand new Hogwarts Lecturing robes, cocking an eyebrow enquiringly. "What d’<em>you </em>think, Professor? Might we? Is it possible?"<br/><br/>"Of course you may replicate the experiment, Potter," Snape chided, sneering down that nose. He must’ve been all of twenty-three or twenty-four then, Harry decided, but still as much of a rude git as always. "Even at that young age I was more than capable of creating effective mixtures which produced consistent results. Built my reputation on it, Potter—is your memory starting to fail you, now? Or are you merely weak-witted?”<br/><br/>"Snape," Harry warned.<br/><br/>"Besides," Snape added hurriedly, as this young version was not, perhaps, as acerbic as some of the later models, "it was used, once, and worked quite sufficiently well. As you’ve learnt in your reading, Potter. And through the mere act of breathing, dolt."<br/><br/>"Yes..." Harry knew the story; it warmed the cockles of his heart and left him more in charity with the greasy old git than ever. Who’d have thought? "Yes, I know you did, Snape. Thank you, again. The question is, and remains, can <em>we</em>? We’ll have to scare up this huge long list of ingredients—some of which are now likely either extinct or forbidden--and then time the ritual you’ve devised exactly for this year’s Beltane’s beginning—and Malfoy <em>will </em>have to know. He must. I can’t just go and change things up on him. It will affect the children—all of them. And Gin, too—and also Neville, likely. You know how <em>he</em> is. We’ll be needing that cauldron you’ve willed him, Snape. And, too, we must be very careful how we go about this. No foul ups this time. We can’t afford it."<br/><br/>"Of course we will, Harry," Hermione murmured. "Always."<br/><br/>Snape smiled at them both. Truly smiled—beamed his full approval. This younger Snape could manage that sort of action, it seemed. No wonder he and Hermione rubbed along so well with one another; she’d been landed with the only pleasant Snape in existence!<br/><br/>"Good on you, Potter. Glad to hear you’ve learnt at least <em>something</em>." He glanced at the painted tome propped on his folded knee; turned it just so, adjusting its facing edge carefully, so that Harry, peering, could finally note the title: <em>The Art and History of Time-Altering Magicks</em>. "I think, though," the portrait Professor added thoughtfully, "you’ll find that our young Malfoy is already thinking upon similar lines, Potter. Ah! Oi! Miss Granger! Do have a care for that one page—the ink’s poisoned!"<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Willow</b></span><br/><br/>Harry had the sneaking suspicion Malfoy was actually<em> not</em> faking it for all he was worth. Oh, he talked it up and Harry, naturally, had to come back up his nose about <em>malingering gits</em> and not give him an inch of sympathy—Ron required it, as much as he required oxygen—but.<br/><br/>But, but, but, there were always complicating factors.<br/><br/>Snape was Malfoy’s Head of House and he wasn’t about to allow for any form of malingering, not even on the part of his pet boy. And Dumbledore—Harry trusted Dumbledore—why would he ever allow Malfoy to swan about with a bandage and a sling for that long? It had been months, now! And Pomfrey, too. She was no fool, Madam. Malfoy would’ve been fixed up right quick if it were only a scratch.<br/><br/>Not that Buckbeak had ever meant to hurt Malfoy. Malfoy was just a git, and an arrogant git at that, and Buckbeak was (Harry agreed with Hagrid) a nice enough fellow for a beast but he had a bird brain, all the same. It had been unintentional, and absolutely Malfoy had over-reacted, <em>but</em>.<br/><br/>That didn’t lessen Harry’s sneaking suspicion that Malfoy really was hurt. His pride, certainly, but also his body, and specifically his arm. And Harry was noticing bodies, for the first time ever. In between bouts of worry over Voldemort and fretting over Sirius Black and deflecting Hermione (‘Study, study, study, Harry; you’re missing so much of the basics!’) and pandering to Ron’s somewhat fragile state (Ron wasn’t doing so well with puberty, likely because it had attacked him nearly overnight), Harry noticed them: supple, budding young bodies, springing upwards like young shrubs, reaching for the light. Even <em>he</em> had managed to gain a few millimeters here and there and fill in a bit across the shoulders. Malfoy, of course, with his rich parents and his wealthy background, and his mother, who sent him sweets like clockwork, was a fair flower already, and leagues ahead of Harry as far as physical maturity went. He was a young god, Harry thought reluctantly, though he didn’t—and wouldn’t—have ever put it that way.<br/><br/>He’d say Malfoy was <em>fit</em>. Except for that bum arm of his. Which likely was real enough, given Buckbeak’s actual beak, sharp as a razor as it was. But there was only one way to know for sure, and that was by doing a bit of reconnaissance.<br/><br/>As far as Hermione ever knew, Harry had only been in the Slytherin Common Room the one time, and had quickly got himself out too, business completed. But Harry had decided some time previous that if the elder members responsible for his safety and well-being weren’t willing to inform him of things—important, crucial things, like that Sirius Black was his godfather, for fuck’s sake!—then he should take steps to learn them for himself. He’d got rather surefooted as a result, finding his way ‘round Hogwarts in the dark, under the cloak, and he was justifiably proud of that accomplishment. He was yet more proud of the way he always had a firm handle on the ever-changing Slytherin password (by grace of Goyle or Crabbe, generally, who had larger lungs and thus louder whispers) and therefore had access to their gossip at will.<br/><br/>Ron would complain later that Harry was ‘obsessed’ with Malfoy; he didn’t know the bleeding half of it.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Mint</b></span><br/><br/>"Harry, what did you<em> do</em>? Add mint?"<br/><br/>"Some. But I think this fire needs to be a bit higher—and hotter. Shift back, will you? I’m going to give it a boost."<br/><br/>"No—<em>you</em>, Potter. Remove yourself from the work space, git. Let the expert do it. And it was far too soon for the mint—can you not <em>read</em>? It’s right here, just as Severus noted it."<br/><br/>"It was not too soon for the mint, dickweed. Hermione went over this part of the Potion with me just the five thousand times. I know what I’m doing. Likely more than you do, prick."<br/><br/>"Hah! I’m not so certain of that, Harry!" Draco snorted, sotto voce. "I have doubts, pinhead. This was never your best subject."<br/><br/>He tossed a handful of something spark-creating into the Beltane fire. Harry glared across it as it shot up high and higher, flaming a delicate violet.<br/><br/>"I heard that, git."<br/><br/>"Piss off, Potter," Draco replied fondly. "Here, hand me that. I’ll do it."<br/><br/>"Fine."<br/><br/>Harry rocked back on his heels, pulling his offensive hand (which clutched a huge handful of shredded catmint) away from the newborn flames and offering them up to his partner in all things. He heaved a terribly put-upon sigh. He’d not much sleep the night before and his temper was string-tight and wicked thin at the edges. Draco was only adding to it, really, and Harry truly wasn’t in the mood for another tiff. Especially over something as negligible as who was permitted to add what ingredients when.<br/><br/>"You know, sometimes I wish we’d offed your arrogance too, Draco dearest, along with old Riddle," he remarked, frowning fondly at his companion. "Maybe that would explain my deep and continual urge to pummel you rotten."<br/><br/>"Maybe…"<br/><br/>Malfoy shrugged a shoulder and stirred the burgeoning embers. The first log had caught; it was only a matter of time before their small bonfire would be waist-high and capable of burning for hours.<br/><br/>Only a matter of <em>time</em>…<br/><br/>"But I wouldn’t go there, Potter, not if I were you. You want me just as I am; told me so often enough."<br/><br/>"I do, yes." Harry grinned, dipping his chin, pondering time—and Snape—and the methods used to obtain happiness. "More fool I."<br/><br/>"Sod off. And allow <em>me</em>, Master Auror Potter, to add the remaining ingredients, if you please. I’m faster at this sort of work and far more accurate. And I’ll need that blasted wand of yours in a minute, to stir. Two-fisted job, wracking reality this way and that to fit one’s requirements. I wish there was some other way."<br/><br/>"How poetic, git. There isn’t, sorry. Time Turners don’t cut it—we’ve Snape’s way or no way. Oi! Not too much persimmon, there! And don’t overdo the thyme. We want to flavour this, not swamp it!"<br/><br/>Draco huffed, scowling, his face pinkening as the heat rose off the gathered logs that constituted the base of their Beltane Bonfire. Sparks popped and hissed as green wood was consumed, laid as it was in criss-cross and runic shapes above the aged oak and willow, rowan and hawthorn.<br/><br/>"Harry, Harry, I’m on it—trust me. It’s exactly as it should be—golden-brown and at a low boil. How many times now have we done this?"<br/><br/>"Er, four? Three?" Harry cocked his head. "Three. That first few didn’t really count. I’ve never counted them, at least."<br/><br/>"Three officially then, and this last should be the very Charm, if Janus smiles. The fourth fire we burn is the truly crucial one, despite what the gobs think. Four’s just as magical as three ever was; ask your damned Muggles about that. Even they know, Potter."<br/><br/>Harry shrugged. They weren’t his Muggles, though Draco always claimed they were, for argument’s sake.<br/><br/>"Nnn. If Persephone smiles, you mean," he replied. "She’s the bloody one we need, Draco. Fertility, regrowth, all that guff. Ugh, we’ll have to drink this horrendous concoction one last time, you realize? Add more mint."<br/><br/>"No more mint, Potter. Plenty of mint already, believe me. And it’s Demeter, actually. Mother goddess, just as the Muggle’s Mary. Or Isis. Now, she was a rare contrary bitch, that one. Pieced together an entire god, Isis did. And don’t think to debate the Muggle or the Wizarding mythos with me, Harry; you’re not sufficiently competent for all your reading National Geographic, and…erm, if you would? I need the next one, please."<br/><br/>Harry tossed in the contents of a vial with flair. He also flung kindling—carefully pruned to exact matching lengths—with the other. The Beltane fire hissed satisfactorily and gave off the distinct odour of lavender. Mixed, strangely enough, with cider.<br/><br/>"There!" he announced. "Powdered thyme, lemon, one dram. Counterclockwise stir once, then reverse, then again—and what d’you mean, ‘<em>I’m </em>not competent’? I wasn’t arguing it, either, prat. If you want this thankless task so badly, you may have it, with all my good will. Fire away, berk. Have at it. Stir your grumpy little heart out."<br/><br/>Draco scowled at him, fondly, the firelight flickering kindly over the frown he kept up for habit’s sake. Frowns, real ones, weren’t the currency of their exchange…not now, <em>this</em> now. Not for a long time. Point was to keep it that way.<br/><br/>"Snape was my Head of House, Potter, remember? ‘Stopper death’, yeah? Old git taught me everything I know about brewing and what he didn’t is all in his notebooks. Or Granger’s fat head, nowadays."<br/><br/>"Old bastard," Harry grumbled, "you know, he could’ve left me something other than his own bloody portraits. That silver cauldron Nev’s got is awfully nice and you’ve those lovely bookends, the gryphon ones that speak in riddles—now that’s a nice set, rather. Go well in my study, they would. Wish he’d left me those in place of that damned locket."<br/><br/>"Grabby!" Draco scolded. "And you’ve no need to be so. I use the bookends in the lab at home; help your damned self, Harry. You’d be welcome. I’ve plenty of others, for Merlin’s sake."<br/><br/>Harry merely shook his head, passing off the bookends as truly unimportant.<br/><br/>"No…I don’t care that much. Still…would’ve been pleasant to be remembered kindly by the old git as Lily’s son, or maybe even as the stupid Saviour of the bloody world, eh? Anything other than as his worst ever student—and Dad’s son. I cringe, Draco, you realize? He could’ve gone without the blasted portraits of himself if he wanted my attentions so much. Could’ve willed me nearly anything else he’d stashed away at Spinners—at least anything other than his bloody sneering face peering at me every time I look up from my book. <em>Two</em> sneering faces, actually, if I open this." Harry swung the locket he wore always, dangling it over the fire on its blackened chain. "Bloody pocket Snape. Huh!"<br/><br/>"Oi, Potter!" came a faint querulous voice. "You will rue the day you drop me, you little monster! You. Will. Rue!"<br/><br/>"Oh, so sorry, Professor." Harry drew the locket back to him and regarded it with eyebrows raised and a look of great satisfaction. "Didn’t realize you could feel that. My apologies."<br/><br/>"Little git," the interior of the locket snarled. "Put me away now, Potter; you’ve no need of me if you are preparing my brew properly in the first place. Let me sleep. I’m exhausted, thanks to you."<br/><br/>"Of course we are preparing it properly, Professor. Or rather, Draco is. Your golden boy. That’s better than good enough, isn’t it?"<br/><br/>"Hah!"<br/><br/>The locket only issued a faint, die-away snort, and Harry tucked it back down his shirt front, smiling.<br/><br/>"Git, isn’t he? See what I mean, love? No relief."<br/><br/>Draco grinned at him from his place stationed almost atop the small cauldron, his face perspiring as he continued his endless stirring.<br/><br/>"I know, I know, believe me—I do <em>know</em>. He<em> is</em> a wanker, Harry; always was, and a stingy bastard. For all his, ahem, good points—and don’t mention I’ve said any of that, Harry, not to him. He’s in my bloody lab, you know. I’ve got him all day long sometimes, on weekends. A trial, that."<br/><br/>"Agreed."<br/><br/>Harry chuckled along, sharing a speaking glance. After but a moment, though, Draco’s face fell and he was abruptly again the serious, sincere man Harry had come to know and love over the years.<br/><br/>"Alright there, Draco?" Harry’s look went from amused to quizzical in an instant.<br/><br/>"Yes, I suppose…” Draco nodded absentmindedly, “oh, but look, Harry, don’t pay any mind to those damned old Greeks, alright? Or any of that folderol. Granger and I only use them for touch points when we modify the Potion. Not important now, though; all that’s over and sorted. Now we stir and add, stir and drink, stir and wait—and bloody hope to hell we’ve tweaked it properly. This time, at least. We’ll know in the morning, I’d guess."<br/><br/>Harry quirked his lips; in the gloaming, it may’ve been a smile that settled upon them.<br/><br/>"I certainly hope so, Draco. And I hope it’s all to the good. I don’t like this, you know? The bloom’s gone off, rather."<br/><br/>"We will, don’t worry. We will." Draco bent to his task with a tiny huff of breath and a gathering frown of intense concentration, reversing his perpetual, even-gaited stirring counterclockwise. Another handful of something minced was added. The cauldron bubbled nastily, sending up a lingering curl of black, acrid soot.<br/><br/>"Well…get it right, then, love," Harry urged, bustling about to gather more ingredients and lay them out for the designated Stirrer. "I want to sleep at home again, where I should be. I’ve missed you," he chided.<br/><br/>Draco blushed a brighter hue, his cheeks burning not only from the heat of the fire, but made no reply, only ducked his chin stubbornly. A pinch of something else was sprinkled in precise quantity. The fire sizzled before its tenders, hissing vague Parseltongue-like ‘esses’ and emitting showers of magenta sparks.<br/><br/>“Draco?” Harry broke the silence at last, shivering a bit as the lightest of zephyr’s sprung up from the lake’s edge, but a few meters distant.<br/><br/>"Same goes."<br/><br/>His reply was a barely audible mutter, but Draco’s unoccupied hand crept surreptitiously down his shirt front, finally alighting in an uneasy rest atop his flies. Harry, peering from the corner of one eye, watched with satisfaction as his lover gave his bits a fast, rough rub, even as he spun away to pluck up the next ingredient ready for adding.<br/><br/>"Same goes."<br/><br/>Draco snarled it a second time directly at their tiny Beltane blaze. Harry’s smile morphed into a happy grin. It was as good as magic, wasn’t it? Janus would be sure to smile.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Nettle</b></span><br/><br/>Severus Snape, whilst not a pretty man, had had no lack of portraits painted, ‘ere he passed. The first as a youthful boy of seventeen, for his graduation. It was the done thing in his mother’s family and thus this small thing was completed. The second was painted upon his assumption of the responsibility of teaching Potions, as a usual expectation of newly hired Hogwarts staff, and featured him in his brand new Lecturer’s robes, at three-quarter view; his innate haughty air could not quite disguise his nervousness. The third was painted as of his tenth year of tenure. This was the Snape Harry knew: the scowling, lank-tressed man with a chip the size of a rabid Horntail on his shoulder. The penultimate portrait was of Snape as Headmaster, and was displayed in the Headmaster’s office. In it he was worn and grim; years older in appearance than he actually had been. The last was a locket painting, small and vibrant, and showed him approximately two years before his death. The jewelry was of silver, tarnished, and contained in addition two separate locks of hair, each tied tight with silver thread, and neither sort was Snape’s.<br/><br/>These portraits, like Snape’s effects and property, were all willed very specifically. There was some surprise engendered on the part of his recipients: Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom, Hermione Granger—though the last-named heir was entirely expected: <em>Draco Malfoy</em>.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Hyssop</b></span><br/><br/>Draco Malfoy was assuredly not ‘faking it’; the pain was very real and he’d the scars to prove—along with a host of other small weals, bumps and bruises he’d accumulated over the last few years, courtesy Potter. Plus, Potter was awfully quick to defend the Mudblood but he didn’t seem to ruddy care that there were always other facets to an issue. Not that Draco was a debater (except in the Slytherin Common Room) or that he was all about Truth and Justice; er, <em>not</em>. Mostly he could give a rat’s arse, really. But Potter was always spouting off about how Mudbloods were equal to regular Wizards and how Purebloods were always oppressing them—or maybe that was Granger spouting, but Potter agreed, the bleater, and so same difference. The point was, <em>he </em>wasn’t even aware he was a bloody hypocrite and Draco very much wanted<em> him</em> to realize. Because it was a damned shame that Potter should walk about and talk nonsense and be proclaimed a ‘hero’ when Draco had to walk about and be derided by stupid Gryffindors for having a giant beast go mental on him and then still end up the villain of the piece.<br/><br/>Wasn’t bloody fair, that. <em>Potter</em> wasn’t fair. Draco should’ve been first in line to be his best mate, not that sodding Weasley (and don’t get him started on Weasleys; some things shouldn’t be repeated in polite company, not even in the sanctum of the Slytherin Common Room) or that little Witch his Nibs made sheep’s eyes at so constantly. Cho, was it? Did Potter think they were all blind as common bats and wouldn’t bloody notice? The bint even had a boyfriend; a Ceddie something, a freaking Hufflepuff ninny with a nice arse and no brain cells to speak of, but that wasn’t important now, either. He just didn’t know where Potter thought he was going with that, the little runt. As if anyone would choose him over Celebrity Ceddie—it just wasn’t on.<br/><br/>And it wasn’t fair. That really got Draco’s goat, the bloody-minded unfairness of Potter. Some hero—hah!<br/><br/>No, it wasn’t, the whole situation. Not that Malfoys were necessarily better than any other sort of Pureblood, or even any other sort of Wizard or Witch (even Draco could admit the Mudblood Witch was more than excelling, marks-wise) but…but, this wasn’t a pure meritocracy, was it?<br/><br/>Or maybe it was. Maybe they were all in some silly arse competition, a secret one, to impress Hero Potter and then he’d be all pally with the winners and everyone else would just slink off and be envious. Or not. Because Draco wasn’t envious at all; it just wasn’t right. Not of Potter, at least.<br/><br/><em>He’d</em> been raised to believe that hero-types should be just and fair, at the very least. It was essential, really. All those stories Nanny had read him; all those tales of Arthur and Merlin and the Knights. And that heroes, as a species, could instantly discern truth, hail beauty and laud honour. And power. And Draco had at least three of those attributes in buket loads and not just because he was a Malfoy, either. At any rate, heroes weren’t supposed to be petty and short-sighted, were they? Spectacled, stubby and arrogant?<br/><br/>Maybe Potter wasn’t; maybe he was only deluded. Draco had noticed that Potter had some spark of intelligence, native, which was in direct contradiction to his oblivious acceptance of the ‘Purebloods are unmitigated arses’ nonsense (another direct contradiction, because wasn’t Weasley Pureblooded as they come; now what, Potter?) and really, the little git should take the time to examine his thinking and correct it. He owed it to Draco for hurting him; well…for being involved in hurting him, because of course even Potter hadn’t set the damned hippogriff on Draco on purpose. That was…that was something which had somehow transpired—his memory was vagueish at best, really—and Draco was vaguely ashamed of it, yes, and vaguely ashamed, too, that he’d lashed out after and requested the stupid beast be put down instantly.<br/><br/>He’d an abominable temper, he did. Mum always said so. But he truly hadn’t thought Father would leap on the chance to do just that—since when had Father even been <em>that</em> quick to defend him, before? Malfoys were supposed to be powerful enough not to need defences, right? But then the entire course of events had gone mental as bloody Janus Thickey Ward and there was Draco, cast as the sodding villain yet again.<br/><br/>He was sick to death of being misconstrued. He was weary of being misjudged. So when Potter came across him down by the Lake’s edge, and wasn’t accompanied by his minions and sycophants and neither was Draco, he said as much.<br/><br/>"Huh?" Potter replied, not at all intelligently. Draco glared at him, but only in a mild sort of way. A companionable way.<br/><br/>"You’re far too quick off the mark, Potter, accusing me. Hah. That’s a pun, you know? The Mark?"<br/><br/>"What?" Potter narrowed his eyes at him behind the spectacles and seemed not to be making the connections Draco wanted him to be making. "What are you on about, Malfoy?"<br/><br/>"I mean to say, it’s not <em>my </em>fault they wanted to do in that stupid hippogriff of Hagrid’s, Potter. I’m a Fourth Year, for Merlin’s sake; d’you seriously think the Ministry’s going to bow down to me? Get a grip."<br/><br/>"Erm…" Potter looked taken aback, which he well should, Draco decided, and went on.<br/><br/>"That was Father’s doing, and likely the Minister’s, and it must be some grudge against the man-mountain of yours, that half-giant, and I’m sure I don’t know why, but still, it’s not <em>my</em> fault—"<br/><br/>"But it is!" Potter exclaimed and came closer. "If you hadn’t—"<br/><br/>"I was in pain, prat!" Draco was insistent on that, because he had been and it still ached, his arm, and was stiff when it was cold. "Bleeding! So I overreacted! Don’t blame me for absolutely everything, will you? I never thought—"<br/><br/>"That’s the problem, Malfoy—you never think!" Potter was quite close now, enough that the edge of his robes brushed against Draco’s where he was sitting on a Charmed-warm rock, but Draco didn’t bother to shift away. If Potter touched him by accident, well, he wasn’t a girl and Potter-cooties were funny to laugh about with his mates but not what a real man would go on about. A real man—a Wizard—would be worried about the injustice and Draco was, because Potter had clearly done him wrong.<br/><br/>"I do, too, Potter!" he shot back. Drew himself up out of his comfortable slouch, because he did have a fair amount of pride and why not? He was a decent Wizard; maybe not up to the Mudblood’s peculiar level—she was a freak of nature, wasn’t she?—but still! "I’m very clever. Remember that trick with the Dementors? That was all me, Potter! And you fell for it, so don’t say I’m not clever—besides, my marks top yours, every time!"<br/><br/>‘That wasn’t clever, Malfoy; that was mean!" Potter didn’t budge to either sit down or move away, so Draco grabbed hold of his hem, just in case. He tugged, which made Potter stumble. If they were going to have this conversation, they were damned well going to have it and not be interrupted by Potter bolting off.<br/><br/>"It was cruel, Malfoy—I hate Dementors! You don’t know—" Potter was red-faced and he stomped one of his stupid broken down trainers, nearly on Draco’s fingers. "You don’t know the half of it, git."<br/><br/>"Well, it’s not like you’ve told me any of that, is it, Potter?" Draco asked, reasonably enough, and tugged again. Potter lost his balance and collapsed on Draco’s warmed rock next to him. "You think you’re above me for some reason and I don’t know <em>why</em>—"<br/><br/>"Because you’re an arse, Malfoy! That’s why!" Potter was puffing, too, and staring at Draco with those eyes of his, and Draco was lit with a deep burning need to make him take that back. He wasn’t an arse; he was—he was Draco, Draco Malfoy, product of a superior upbringing, and if he thought certain acts were amusing, well, that just proved he had a sense of fun, something Potter sorely lacked—serious all the time, Potter was, and Draco didn’t understand it, and couldn’t make sense of Potter walking about as though the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Hadn’t he already done his hero-ing part? "You’ve been tormenting me from Day One and I don’t even know why, prat! Why would it even matter to you, what I think? You’ve always made it very clear I’m not worth shite to you!"<br/><br/>"I don’t get you," Draco replied sullenly, after a little pause. This was an opportunity, unlooked for; he’d take advantage of it, then. "It’s alright if you Gryffindors fling actual mud at me, Potter, and it’s alright if you break rules right and left, but it’s not at all acceptable when I come back at you with a perfectly harmless prank, Potter. It’s not fair. You insulted me first, Potter! I should be allowed my revenge!"<br/><br/>"But—but! It wasn’t harmless, Malfoy!" Potter was staring at him, as if Draco were from another planet. "I…I’ve had a really awful experience with Dementors, damn it! This last summer—they nearly killed me. They’re horrid beasts, Malfoy—you shouldn’t be going about springing them on people unawares. It’s not funny! It’s not—it’s not Hoyle!"<br/><br/>"Well, how was I to know that, Potter?" Draco was stuck on the tune of <em>reasonable</em>, it seemed. The usual glut of anger wasn’t sluicing through his veins, oddly enough. It wasn’t a bad groove to be in; seemed pretty effective, for once, as Potter hadn’t hexed him yet, or fled, or punched him. "You don’t tell me these things, git. You save all your confidences for your little friends, don’t you?"<br/><br/>"You…you wanted to know? Pull the other one, Malfoy!" Potter was clearly aghast and non-believing. "You could give a fig about me; you hate me!"<br/><br/>"I don’t," Draco replied instantly and stoutly. He didn’t, but Potter did. "I don’t. I might hate what you do, Potter, and what you get away with—plus, you’re bloody best mates with that Mugglish bint and that godsawful Weasel, but I had no cause to hate you, personally, till you went and handed me one."<br/><br/>"Huh. Could’ve fooled me."<br/><br/>"Well, it’s true," Draco huffed, readjusting his robes, fussing with restless fingers. His arm ached something fierce, all the sudden—which explain the wince he couldn’t subdue. "I…just don’t see why, out of all the families available to you, you had to choose that damnably useless prat Weasley, that’s all. Makes no sense. Git’s a waste of space."<br/><br/>"Shut up, Malfoy!" Potter was breathing heavily and his eyes were sparking. "You ass! You don’t know what you’re talking about, you slimy little Slytherin bastard—bet you wouldn’t know what friendship was if it slapped you across the face!"<br/><br/>"I do too, Potter! I know exactly what it is—better than you, I imagine! We Slytherins look after our own, Potter! Something you Gryffs should try sometime. Wasn’t it that Finnegan arse who set you up to take a fall? Hasn’t your horribly ginger Weasel pal abandoned you with not even a second thought? Where’s your House loyalty now, Potter? Hmm? In the rubbish, that’s what!"<br/><br/>"Well—I—that was…that was just a misunderstanding, really," Potter was blushing and he darted his eyes away, afraid to meet Draco’s—or so Draco figured. "Seamus apologized after, most sincerely! Ron, too—and Hermione’s never once ‘abandoned me’, as you so dramatically put it!"<br/><br/>"Right then, Potter. After he was clearly in the wrong, I bet." Draco shrugged his thin shoulders, disbelieving. "Nothing like kissing arse, is there? So, d’you think that’s alright, then? Making it up when it’s too late, really? The damage has been done, Potter, and you know it, too. You’re not that much of a clod. You know it and I know it and anyone with eyes knows it—and you should be a great deal more wary than you are now."<br/><br/>"What? What d’you mean by that—‘wary’?"<br/><br/>Draco grinned the grin of the totally confident, supreme in his knowledge that Slytherin ties were far superior to soppy Gryffindor friendships. His sort, at least, were built on centuries of inter-family precedent. "Because Crabbe and Goyle would <em>never</em> consider doing that to me, Potter. They know me better than that—they’re loyal!"<br/><br/>"Really?" Potter raised his chin. "I’d’ve thought they didn’t know much more than whatever they were told to know, the great gits. You can really pick ‘em, Malfoy—sodding thugs, they are. Pathetic examples."<br/><br/>Draco sneered, curling his upper lip, at a bit of a loss in the face of Potter’s claim. Yes, the two of them were essentially thugs, but what did that matter? It took all kinds—not everyone could be as bloody phenomenal as that freak Granger.<br/><br/>"Maybe so, Potter, but at least they’re loyal to me, above all else! More than you can say for yours!"<br/><br/>Harry’s turn to shrug; he twisted his entire body away from Draco, fingers clutching at his bookbag strap, muscles tensing. He seemed to be on the verge of taking flight, ending this little unplanned tete a tete abruptly.<br/><br/>"Look," he growled, "is there a point to this, Malfoy? Because I came down here to think and I’d rather do that by myself, alright? I’ll…er, I’ll just go over there."<br/><br/>Draco scrambled internally; he’d Potter’s attention for once, in a non-combative sort of manner. He wasn’t planning on releasing it so soon as all that.<br/><br/>"No! No—er. No need, Potter; I’m leaving in a moment," he prevaricated, though of course he’d not been planning to budge from his comfortable perch until just before the call the supper. "Had enough damp to last me ages. Get enough of it in the dungeons. Don’t know why I even come here, really."<br/><br/>That seemed to give Potter pause. He turned back to face Draco, his brow crinkled, though Draco wouldn’t say he was frowning, precisely. More…curious than anything else.<br/><br/>"Because…because it’s peaceful?" Potter’s query was softer; the tension of prior had dissipated already, like so much smoke.<br/><br/>"Maybe so." Draco shrugged. It was the aesthetic of it that appealed the most to him—that, and the privacy. Slytherin was never private, exactly. No House was.<br/><br/>Potter settled back again, leaving go of his book bag strap. Stuck his hands flat behind him on the ground and lounged back upon them. Draco shifted the merest bit, so they could look at each other without neck strain. If they were going to…chat, now, at least he’d be comfy doing it.<br/><br/>"Er…it’s nice, at least, that you defend them, your mates," Potter offered, after a minute’s unquiet silence. "That’s alright."<br/><br/>"Thanks, Potter. Nice of you to approve. I’m so happy." He wasn’t, really…and yet, he was. Glory! Potter had come out with an actual compliment! Would wonders never cease?<br/><br/>"No—I meant it. I mean to say, where would we be, yeah? Without mates?"<br/><br/>"We’d be in your bloody daft Longbottom’s shoes, gnatbrain!" is what Draco meant to retort, but he didn’t. He swallowed it back and only nodded politely. Barely.<br/><br/>"Never had them, not before."<br/><br/>"Yes?" Draco wasn’t curious or anything, but if Potter was going to talk anyway…maybe he’d learn something he could make use of later, when Potter yanked him off at the bloody short hairs and he was in need of fresh ammunition. If Potter wanted to get chatty, it could work to Draco’s advantage, yes. Dumb-arse!<br/><br/>"Not when I was living with my aunt and uncle, at least."<br/><br/>"Oh."<br/><br/>There were a billion questions jostling on the tip of Draco’s ready tongue. Curious—he was only curious, because the Hero Boy had always been a bit of mystery, walking, and this—this was an unparalleled chance to delve into a personality that had befuddled Draco from the moment they’d met up at Malkin’s robes shop. That was all; nothing more. Draco was Slytherin; ergo, he was curious. Knowledge equaled power—intimate knowledge provided a deeper advantage.<br/><br/>"Little Whingeing isn’t exactly…what I’d call friendly, not to Wizards. Not to people who don’t fit in."<br/><br/>"No?"<br/><br/>"Um, no. Muggles probably<em> are</em> weird, to you, Malfoy. I can see that, if you‘ve never had much to do with them. And they’re not all…friendly, or anything. Or even just civil. Not the kids, at least."<br/><br/>"I see…" Draco had practically bitten his tongue in half; could taste the blood seeping. "Really, now?"<br/><br/>Restraint; that was the order of the day. Potter was like some woodland creature—a stag, poised on the edge of leaping away—and Draco rather wanted to coax him into confessing more. What Weasley likely knew already, and Granger. The details.<br/><br/>"Yeah. I mean, they didn’t even want me to be a Wizard, you know? You’d think they’d be glad to have me gone, but my uncle—he’s horrid. Just horrid."<br/><br/>"Ah."<br/><br/>"And my cousin Dudders. Yuck, what a bloody wanker he is!"<br/><br/>"Oh?"<br/><br/>"Mmm, absolutely," Potter nodded. Then he ceased abruptly, his face a study in contradictory emotions, all of them fascinating. Made to stand up, just as suddenly, as if a bee had settled into his bonnet. "Right, enough of that. Well, I’ve got some revision to do, Malfoy, so…see you."<br/><br/>"Wait! Just that fast, Potter? You can’t just—you can’t tell me you’re not going to finish that!"<br/><br/>"Finish <em>what</em>, Malfoy?"<br/><br/>"The story, Potter—your story? What did your cousin do to you, exactly? Why’s your uncle such a beast? You can’t stop there! I won’t let you!"<br/><br/>"I’m not a ‘story’, Malfoy. I’m not some stupid made-up character you can tweak around to make what you like—I’m a person!"<br/><br/>"No—I know that, Potter! I’m… I meant. I’d like to know, that’s all."<br/><br/>"Why?"<br/><br/>"Er, <em>why</em>? Just because I would, that’s all. You’re not so bad, Potter, when you’re just talking...and, and you’ve made me curious."<br/><br/>"Don’t care, Malfoy. Likely said too much already—and it’s not as if <em>you</em> care, either. Just looking for an in, aren’t you? Help your daddy?"<br/><br/>"Um, no. Not really. I mean, my father’s not exactly—"<br/><br/>"Don’t get me started on your father, Malfoy!"<br/><br/>"I’m just saying! He’s not—easy to live with. He wants me—"<br/><br/>"He wants you to what, Malfoy?"<br/><br/>"He’s always—and then when I can’t—and there’s you and that Mu—Granger freak, always, and…well, it’s not easy on my side, either, Potter."<br/><br/>"Huh! Riiiight, Malfoy."<br/><br/>"It isn’t! I’ve got a lot to live up to, Potter!"<br/><br/>"Hmm-mmm. So sorry to hear and all that, Malfoy, but—"<br/><br/>"Look, it’s true. And—and I’m sorry about your parents, alright? Never should’ve—I—well, parents, they’re alright to have and it’s a frigging shame about yours, Potter, but you make me so angry all the time, and you always act as though it’s no big deal being the Boy Who Lived, and all that guff that goes with—bringing down the Dark Lord, of all things, Potter! That’s amazing, you know—that’s just unreal! You were what, one? One year old and singlehandedly routed the most powerful Wizard who’s ever lived—"<br/><br/>It was a grudging sort of admiration, but sincere. Potter cocked a wary brow at Draco.<br/><br/>"He’s not dead yet, Malfoy. Bet your daddy knows that, even if you don’t." Potter’s retort was acid.<br/><br/>"Well, that aside, I mean. It’s pretty…cool, what you did."<br/><br/>"Don’t even remember it, alright? Look—drop it. I’ve gotta go. Hermione’s going to have kittens if I’m not back for supper."<br/><br/>"Oh—right. It is that time, isn’t it?"<br/><br/>"Yes. So see you ‘round, Malfoy."<br/><br/>"Um…right. Potter. Though not if I—"<br/><br/>"See you first, I know, I <em>know</em>. Git."<br/><br/>"Same to you, Potter."<br/><br/>But there was no fire there. Only a vague bit of longing, and Draco thought instantly that he was a soppy sod, to feel it. They weren’t mates, not on the basis of one civil conversation…not by a long shot.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Riverbank Clay, Dried &amp; Sifted</b></span><br/><br/>"Shouldn’t the adjustments be on the other end of the continuum, Harry? I think we’re too early, tweaking Fifth Year. Sixth I can readily understand; Fifth not so much."<br/><br/>"No, git. There’s a thread here, still, that’s pulled out of place. Otherwise, Ron wouldn’t be bashing your reputation around like a bloody badminton birdie at the Ministry and the kids would be alright. They’re <em>not</em> alright, Draco; not at all, and worse, I received an Owl from Gin last night. She’s having strange dreams again and says Nev’s looking very pale and ill. Worried, like. Keeps stroking that damned cauldron Snape willed him and muttering over his plants. Peculiar."<br/><br/>"Shite, not again, Potter." The eye roll wasn’t ire, it was disconcertment…and a sizable counterpart to Nev’s purported illness, mental or no. This wasn’t the outcome they’d been hoping for, certainly. This wasn’t as Snape had promised; something was off, and it was likely operator headspace. Snape had never once fucked up a Potion.<br/><br/>"Yes, again—unfortunately. Look, Hermione thinks there’s something we forgot, the very first time we did this. Have to fix it up proper or we’ll be doing it again, come next May. And every May after. And I can’t live with that outcome, Draco. No one can; we’re all too deep in, now. We need to get it right!"<br/><br/>"Hmmm. No, that wouldn’t be a good thing, Harry, repeating and repeating, even if…. You know how it loses its stretch, the warp of time. That’s why they say—"<br/><br/>"Third time’s the Charm," Harry replied grimly. "I know, git, and that’s exactly why, and…"<br/><br/>"And?" Draco Malfoy was concerned, but he’d never cared to show it, being a total stoic. No, nix that. Not a stoic, Draco, but he did possess a stiff upper lip. Still, Harry could feel him watching intently as he stirred the mass of bubbling ingredients in the small cauldron. "What, Potter?"<br/><br/>"We’re on the fourth, I’m pretty certain. There’s a problem. That’s the problem, really. We shouldn’t be on the fourth yet. Our timing’s off."<br/><br/>"Oh."<br/><br/>"Yeah."<br/><br/>"Why didn’t I remember that, then, from before? I should have it recorded in my notes, Harry. Why isn’t it?"<br/><br/>Harry cleared his throat, and looked away, not wanting to meet those grey eyes. Stoic Malfoy might be, but this was the cure-all for all their ills—the creeping feelings of something not quite right, the frustration, the unflagging anger—the infidelity.<br/><br/><em>The infidelity</em>. That was the problem. Astoria, Ginny—nineteen years of lying. And the kids, damn their beautiful eyes—all four of them. Because of <em>them</em>, this wasn’t simple; would never be simple, and…might now not, in the very bitter end of things—might now <em>not</em> be successful.<br/><br/>He—they—could fuck this up mightily—or they could do it right and make it work. Had screwed it up already, apparently, if either of them were even married, yet.<br/><br/>….A little less of the olive wood shavings, a few more pomegranate seeds, crushed. Drink at the first light of bonfire or down their shares at the last glimmer of ember in ash. Which and what weren’t quite settled. Snape had provided the bones; it was how they reconstructed the flesh that mattered. And Hermione kept them on keel, a benign librarian of minute changes wrought. Changes in the ambient currents; alterations in the brew of Time.<br/><br/>Time.<br/><br/>Choice and decision. Circumstance and alternates. And Potions and ancient Beltane Magic: it all added up to a chaotic mess, in the end. Snape adored lecturing them both upon the riddles of time-altering magic with a passion; one he’d obviously felt for very few other things when he was yet alive.<br/><br/>Harry didn’t begrudge him that, oh, no. It was only…dangerously wearing. Being haunted in person always was. Damned greasy old git! If only he’d consent to be a shade less cryptic! But perhaps he didn’t know, either. It had only been the one time Snape had used his invention and he’d only altered just the one small event. Just the one and here were Harry and Draco, playing with time as if it were nothing more than a mere Seeker’s Game.<br/><br/>Malfoy was muttering darkly to himself, bent over the cauldron.<br/><br/>"Harry?"<br/><br/>"Yeah?"<br/><br/>"I hate to say this, but...d’you—d’you think it’s too late, then? If we had to return that many years, there’s no freakin’ way that’s a good thing. At the very worst, we should be adjusting the meeting in King’s Cross, not<em> this</em>."<br/><br/>"Don’t know, honestly. Hermione’s and Snape’s calculations both indicate 1996."<br/><br/>"My god." Draco was shaking his head, pale face grim and pinched in the light of his Lumos. "Harry, I don’t know—I just simply don’t know. If it doesn’t work—I—I don’t think I could stand for it, Harry. Not again. The last time—the last time was bad enough, Harry." Draco ended on a stifled sob; he didn’t allow it to linger, though, spinning abruptly away to face the Forest of Forbidding Trees, the Whomping Willow that guarded their small Beltane fire, his spine stiff as a stone wall. Harry nodded anyway, knowing exactly what his sometime lover meant.<br/><br/>"Well, hopefully, love, you won’t have to—and neither will anyone else. If we change it early enough—or so the theory goes—we’ll circumvent it entirely. It’ll be alright, Draco."<br/><br/>"Hopefully." Draco swallowed hard, his throat moving in the flicker of their small fire, and Harry wished with all his might he could stop the infernal stirring and go hold him. But the stirring was crucial, too crucial to screw up, and he’d maybe not hold him again if he mucked it up now. "Hopefully—but you’d better be absolutely exacting, Harry. No mistakes whatsoever. None. And it’s my turn in a quarter hour—don’t forget."<br/><br/>"I will be," Harry replied quietly, "as I know you will, Draco."<br/><br/>"Then, right. And here," Draco barked at him. "Take this vial. You’ll be needing the rubbed sage right about now, correct?"<br/><br/>"Yeah, thanks." Harry accepted it, shaking loose the premeasured requirement. The cauldron seemed to be appeased; he grimaced. Next up was truffles and they were always volatile. "That’s very helpful."<br/><br/>"I hope…I do hope it’ll be my very sincere pleasure, Potter." Draco’s voice was thin; he’d returned to his vigil and was staring fixedly at the Forest, watching the shadows creep forward and back before their small brave flame. "Always."<br/><br/>Harry bobbed his head and let his hair trickle forward. It wouldn’t do to share the scowl he knew he wore. No, not at all.<br/><br/>"Me, too."<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Poppy</b></span><br/><br/>"I—I don’t know about this, Potter," Draco blushed, and was instantly shamed. He did not blush!<br/><br/>"It’s only a kiss, idiot. Just to see." Harry shrugged. "You know, what it’s like."<br/><br/>"Still—I think—mmph!"<br/><br/>Potter was a bloody Gryffindor, yes. He’d smashed his mouth against Draco’s, with all the subtlety of a fist. Draco…rather liked it, that smooth slipperiness moving beneath his tongue. The urgency.<br/><br/>Wait, what? Tongue?<br/><br/>"Mmm—hmm," Harry purred, and inched himself over Draco’s just-parted thighs, pristine in pressed trousers beneath his unbuttoned school robes. "That’s what I’ve thinking it would be like. That, exactly."<br/><br/>"Mmm-<em>what</em>, Potter?" Draco still had the presence of mind to articulate. A tongue stoppered that, decisively. Squirmed all about the inside of his mouth, lapping up his saliva, setting his gums to tingling. Stretched deep down his throat so he swallowed involuntarily.<br/><br/>"Ummm," Harry whispered, "now do that to my cock, yeah?"<br/><br/>Draco jumped at it; in all his days he’d never—but never—even considered!<br/><br/>And found himself upon both knees maybe three minutes on, the taste of salt and Potter filling him, and trickling down his working gullet like lye and honey, mixed.<br/><br/>The fields rustled in the breezes; it was spring, and he’d not gone home for Easter hols. Draco was profoundly glad of it.<br/><br/>The ire of Lucius Malfoy versus the feel of Potter in his mouth? No contest; he’d lie like a fucking rug under Veritaserum just to have another go at it.<br/><br/>He’d do pretty much anything, now.<br/><br/>Draco wondered if Harry knew that.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Rosemary</b></span><br/><br/>It was with an internal start he caught sight of him: that git, that twat, that tosser. That hair, those eyes, those lips (they could twist into the most wonderful of smiles, them, thin though they were and severe.)<br/><br/>He kept his eyes straight ahead with an effort; he modulated his breathing. He never changed his pace, nor showed an ounce of the effect Malfoy had on him. Which was brutal and wrenching and harmful and heady—which was half-memory and half-dream, and all fever-ridden. Which made a travesty of his marriage and painted his cheating soul black as tar.<br/><br/>For if he’d his druthers, he’d stop. He’d not be able to pass by any more than he’d been able to stop his heart from beating.<br/><br/>Still an extremely fit bloke, Draco Malfoy, four years gone. Of course he’d only changed for the better, the berk. He’d grown into his height, had filled out and become a man instead of a wrecked and shattered youth. His grey eyes were (and Harry dared not meet them when he spared that polite nod; he knew this only from the briefest of peripheral glances; he could not allow himself a dram more than that); his grey eyes were--still pools Harry could drown in, willingly. His chest was wide, his torso long under the fitted waistcoat and casually perfect gape of his velvet-lapelled robes. His hair was cut in a style that perfectly framed the high cheekbones, the chiseled jaw, the thin upper lip and the full lower one. Draco was still pointy; yes, yes, he was, but it was the angularity of elegance, born and bred into bones. He was all and everything Harry Potter desired and Harry would <em>not</em> look, dared not stare, would continue his calm traverse down this corridor of damnation and temptation and it would be <em>alright</em>.<br/><br/>He was lucky, as always. When he turned the corner at last and was hidden from view, Malfoy choose to leave in the opposite direction, and away from Harry. Not intersecting, not following, not coincidentally stumbling across one another yet again—no chance of that, thank god. Harry wasn’t forced to relive it; he wasn’t challenged to endure it, being so close by, so near, and yet leagues apart, and unfathomable distances in circumstance.<br/><br/>His marriage was still intact. His sons were safe, as was Malfoy’s little boy—Scorpius, was it?<br/><br/>Ginny would never know. Malfoy’s wife would never know. Acid crawled through his veins like the very devil.<br/><br/><em>He</em> knew, though. He did.<br/><br/>Breathing through his nose, shoulders pressed against the wall as if he were being held at wandpoint by the worst and most terrifying enemy yet, Harry heaved a great sobbing sigh of relief. Ginny did <em>not</em> know. Would never. That was the one important thing, the crucial thing. Glue and bandages; Ginny did not <em>know</em>.<br/><br/>"No."<br/><br/>And with that one word, the crack developed. His mouth was more honest than his own bedeviled heart.<br/><br/>"I mustn’t."<br/><br/>And an ice shelf fell into a dark sea of saline frigidity without fanfare.<br/><br/>"I cannot."<br/><br/>Harry recalled Snape, that greasy old git, stationed now in eternal disapproval in his private study. In paint, he was bearable.<br/><br/>"Oh, no, no, no! No, you won’t, Potter!"<br/><br/>Snape, distiller of that which stoppered Death. Snape, the most intelligent man he’d ever known, though admittedly chary of his great knowledge. He hated to share it with Harry, but death and wooden frames had forced even the Half Blood Prince into some sort of chatty afterlife.<br/><br/>"I can’t!" he reassured himself. "I wouldn’t!"<br/><br/>Who’d loved Harry’s mother. With a passion long enduring.<br/><br/>"Oh…." Harry Potter closed his green eyes in despair. He’d been so very good; he’d been so very…practical. All these years. All these many, many years, quite deliberately and with great Slytherin underhandedness, he’d stoppered Love. "Gods."<br/><br/>"Gods…no."<br/><br/>And Malfoy, who’d raised that one slim hand, who’d murmured ‘Harry!’ under his breath, nearly inaudible, excepting Harry was a trained Auror and every cell of Malfoy left him on high alert; Harry had heard that word.<br/><br/>It fell into his world like a bloody great Muggle Cunard liner anchor through a balsa-wood skiff. Took the bottom right out of it in one fell swoop. Gone.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Gorseblossom</b></span><br/><br/>"I don’t think I can do this, Harry. It’ll hurt—it won’t fit," Draco squirmed. Grass was sticking to him, all over his skin, and he was vastly uncomfortable.<br/><br/>In every way. He ached. He thirsted. He was discontent.<br/><br/>"Please, Draco? I want to—I want to just try it, alright?" How could eyebrows plead like that? How could one boy be that entrancing?<br/><br/>"I—I can’t! Potter, don’t ask it of me, alright? It’s not—it’s not what Malfoys do, alright? I can’t just lie here and take this. M’father would skin me alive if he knew!"<br/><br/>No matter that he’d have died of satisfaction first, but that really was no matter, not to <em>his</em> Father. Point was, he’d be dead as doornail, and then there’d be no more trysts with Harry. No more secret meetings, by the Lake, or Forbidden Forest Edge or Hogsmeade or the now-silenced Shack. No more fumbling caresses and snogging that was outright dangerous to everything Draco cared for—had believed he’d believed in.<br/><br/>He didn’t believe in much, these days. Only the things he could lay physical hands on. No…cancel that. Much of Harry was intangible; it was only now Draco realized what he’d been gasping after, all these years. No wonder it had slipped through his greedy fingers—he’d not known how to hold it gently.<br/><br/>"Then <em>me</em>, Draco," Harry piped up, after a considering moment. He rolled about, finding his hands and knees under him, crushing small plants and the gorses. Looked back over his shoulder as if he’d expected Draco to be on him already, the little miscreant. "Do <em>me</em>, Draco, instead. I don’t mind—I’m alright with a little pain. And it’ll feel good, all over, once you’re past that first nasty tight bit. George said so."<br/><br/>"You talked to a Weasley?" Draco was appalled. "Potter! Potter, you’ve fucked me over; Father will kill me just to start with—and then Crucio my corpse!"<br/><br/>"No! Just about…generalities, that’s all," Harry shrugged and blushed, and even in the midst of a worried fury, Draco found that irresistible. Since when had his heart been attached to leading strings—since when was Harry his be-all and end-all?<br/><br/>What could be done about it? he wondered. Because he should do something…something. Positive. Like put his John Thomas where his mouth longed to be, right there in Harry’s tiny little pink arsehole.<br/><br/>Gods, it was cherry, that. Harry had told him he’d never, once, before. And Draco wanted, so badly. So, so very much, he did want.<br/><br/>"Malfoy! What’re you waiting for? I’m ready, git. Stop stalling. Please?"<br/><br/>Harry, arse in the air, showed him, by dint of much cajoling and a few well-placed insults. And that infectious smile—and that lust-gravelled voice—and the fact that the setting sun turned Harry’s tumbled hair a raven’s wing blue.</p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Part the Second: Fruit and Flower</h2></a>
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    <p>
  <b>Part the Second: Fruit and Flower</b>
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    <em>Love is an old root that creeps through the meadows of sleep,<br/>When the long shadows cast<br/>Thin as a vagrant young vine, it encircles and twines,<br/>And it holds the heart fast<br/>Catches dreamers in the wildwood with the stars in their eyes<br/>And the moon in their tousled hair<br/>But love is a light in the sky, and an unspoken lie<br/>And a half-whispered prayer</em>
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</div><p><br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Pomegranate</b></span><br/><br/>Harry Potter was <em>not</em> the Hero Draco had been searching for, all this time. He was not larger than life; he didn’t glow nor did he attract sudden dramatic falls of sunlight upon his broadening shoulders. He was a stubby little, scruffy little git of a chap, with few manners and all of them ragged—but he was innately kind. Oh, so Gryffindor noble, it was almost abhorrent…except now it was Draco he was being kind to. Solicitous of, the git, as if Draco were fragile.<br/><br/>Kind enough to gather mosses and leaves in the Forbidden Forest for poultices; honourable enough to help Draco mince and chop and grind them into something useful. All to help him with both his assignments and his discomfort, and admittedly, in return for Draco’s not-particularly effective aid in calling off the search for that damnable hippogriff—and Black, the convicted criminal.<br/><br/>Not that Father listened to him. Father had a bloody hard-on for both the hippogriff and Black, of the worst sort.<br/><br/>Draco didn’t think he’d ever feel sorry for the little git, but he did. Black was his godfather! What a terrible thing—and those Dursleys of his—horrid! The worst of Muggles and just another reason Muggles should be controlled—not that he’d say that now, not to Potter’s face, at least. And he never would’ve believed his play for sympathy would be what held Harry to him—but it was, at first.<br/><br/>Draco, being all Slytherin, all the time, made use of it.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Papyrus Reed, Minced</b></span><br/><br/>"Hermione, I think we’ve got another temporal shift."<br/><br/>"Oh?" She swept across to the smaller of the two doorways that led to her ‘special’ libraries. "That’s the second, then. And you’ll be wanting this volume, not that one. And dare I even ask why you’re just telling me this <em>now</em>, Harry Potter?"<br/><br/>"Something one of the boys let slip—and Ron’s a bit off, lately. Glares at Draco something awful and keeps on harping on how Gin can’t possibly be happy, being away from the kids. Got me thinking. Maybe something wore off?"<br/><br/>"Oh…yes. Well, the poles switch too, you know, and we’ve been due for a flip-flop soon. That’s likely it. Will you need help gathering the ingredients? And how’s Draco holding up?"<br/><br/>"Hullo, Granger-Weasley. I’m right here, thanks—and I’m alright."<br/><br/>"No, Snape’s let us in on all his stashes," Harry replied. "Whatever’s not at Spinner’s will be over in the lab at Hogwarts."<br/><br/>"Good-oh. Hi, Draco. Nice to see you again. Well, then…I’ll just make the usual notes for you two, alright?"<br/><br/>"Please, Hermione," Draco said, his hand on a different book spine—one of their old Potions Professor’s earlier journals. "That’d be brilliant. Harry, I think it’s this one we need. Hermione, you were left all the remainder of the Potions texts, correct? That second time—not the first?"<br/><br/>"I was, but I know for ruddy fact you went in and snagged all the first editions and the really ancient folios after the first round, you wanker,” she scolded, twinkling. “It’s in my notes, quite clearly, so..." She shrugged, Draco coughed quickly and got on with it.<br/><br/>"Right, right. I remember. That’s helpful, actually; means we’re not missing anything crucial.” He spun on a heel to regard his partner in crime with a stern eye. “Harry, I’ll be right back—don’t move, alright? Not an inch. Must just pick up something from the Manor. Forgot it when we rushed out."<br/><br/>"Yes, luv." Harry sighed, nodding. What was another twenty minutes, anyway, when they were in the business of trading years worth of them?<br/><br/>"Whipped, Harry," Hermione smiled. "So very whipped you are. Want a quick cuppa while you wait?"<br/><br/>"As if Ron isn’t,” Harry scoffed; smiled ruefully; sighed again. “That’s our lot in life, isn’t it?"<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Olive Wood, Shavings</b></span><br/><br/>Granger had gotten hold of a Time Turner; at least that’s what Potter said. Draco was incensed; he’d already taken steps to call off the execution of the damned beast. What did they need a Time Turner for? Didn’t Potter trust him?<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Holly Berries, Smashed Fine</b></span><br/><br/>"Do you know, Draco, that if Evans had chosen me, say, your Potter wouldn’t exist?"<br/><br/>"Shut up, Professor."<br/><br/>"And that Time, Draco, is the veriest Squid to manage? So many possibilities, so many loose threads and overlap. One must always have a delicate touch. You’re a fool, boy, throwing your lot in with his."<br/><br/>"Please, Sev! Just stop, alright? I’m trying to read your scrawl and you’re not helping!"<br/><br/>"I’ve used that particular Potion of mine once, Draco. For just the one thing—that was all I could do. All Albus would allow me, the old coot."<br/><br/>"What? When? <em>When </em>did you ever?"<br/><br/>"When she died, Draco. You think that an AK is painless? You’re very wrong, if you do. It hurts beyond bearing, having your soul ripped from you, knowing it’s coming. I gave her peace, Draco. It was all I could manage, at the end."<br/><br/>"You—you’re saying you went back and you didn’t save her, Severus? What the bleeding fuck? What—<em>why</em>? Why, when you could’ve…could’ve—Harry could’ve had his parents, Severus, all this while!"<br/><br/>"Without that sodding Potter, Draco, there’d still be a Dark Lord. Did you know? Tom Riddle was driven, beyond death, beyond life. Nothing would stop him. Except Potter. It was…foretold."<br/><br/>"So…so you—because he <em>had</em> to be born, you…?"<br/><br/>"I did nothing to stop it. No. It’s called ‘restraint’, Draco. And speaking of, what of your son and heir? What of…Potter’s?"<br/><br/>"Fuck!"<br/><br/>"Precisely so, Draco."<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Yarrow</b></span><br/><br/>"Potter," Draco nodded.<br/><br/>"Malfoy," Potter nodded back, politely, and was striding down the corridor with a whoosh of robes flapping.<br/><br/>Draco leant against the welcomingly cool plaster of the wall when he was gone and stuck a soothing hand on his trouser’s front, over his groin, pressing down.<br/><br/>One time, they’d had, that he could recall. One time, and it was earth-shattering. Set his world on its ear; made him question everything. Left him bereft and hungry. Was killing him still, two years later.<br/><br/>And it couldn’t go on, not like this. He’d go raving. He’d—he’d murder Astoria and run amuck down the halls of the Manor—through the Ministry itself, and all the nasty rumours that still were whispered would spring back to life.<br/><br/>He’d go mad. That was all there was to it. It had to stop, this.<br/><br/>It was up to him and he must—must—must!<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Comfrey, Essence of</b></span><br/><br/>Hermione shook her head. "I don’t believe so, Harry, but you’re welcome to look through them, if you want."<br/><br/>"I—it’s just, it’s driving me barmy, Hermione. I keep thinking that…well, that I’m forgetting something very important—something crucial…to me. There had to be a reason for Snape to do what he did."<br/><br/>"Hmm."<br/><br/>"And it’s very clear in my head. I mean, I can smell it and taste it—it’s like that’s far more real than anything I taste and smell when I’m awake. And Ginny’s noticing I’m abstracted—and I’m not sleeping properly."<br/><br/>"Have you been to St. Mungo’s; gotten yourself a check-up, Harry?"<br/><br/>"Oh, yes. First thing. Thought it might be a slow-acting curse, but it’s not. Nothing like that. Just…just this feeling I can’t shake. And I thought…maybe. Because you know we fiddled with that, when we saved Buckbeak, and it’s the same feeling, like things were stirred up in the bottom of a cauldron; sediment, Hermione, like that--and then never properly settled back into place."<br/><br/>"Hmm," Hermione nodded again, frowning vaguely. "There’s mention in the texts of residuals, Harry."<br/><br/>"Which are?"<br/><br/>"Like déjà vu. When you could swear you’ve been there before and you’ve not—not that you can consciously recall. It’s even been studied, that."<br/><br/>"Huh."<br/><br/>"Yes. Tell you what, I’ll have a look-see for you. Maybe the Headmaster—"<br/><br/>"Still can’t believe that!" Harry shook his head, continued to prowl restlessly. Played with the golden locket the greasy old git had left him, mysteriously.<br/><br/>"Maybe Snape made something up. He had that whole Potions text annotated, Harry. Sectumsempra was the least of it; we both know that. There may be more of the same in his actual notebooks."<br/><br/>"Oh! Did I tell you?"<br/><br/>"Mmmm?"<br/><br/>"That turned up, that book. The Half-Blood Prince’s book. I was sent it. Someone Owled it to me, just recently. From Gringott’s, the Estates division."<br/><br/>"Really?"<br/><br/>"Yes. No specific return address, regular Post Owl. I checked it; it’s alright, nothing…extra set on it, or anything like that. But just…out of the blue, from the Goblins. I don’t know quite what to make of it. Really."<br/><br/>"Really…"<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Mead</b></span><br/><br/>When Harry was off kilter, he paced. When he was frustrated, he flung himself into anything that had sufficient space for his arse and buried his head in his fists, tugging his hair.<br/><br/>"I only wanted…I just," he muttered and Hermione decided abruptly this was beyond enough. She told him so, no holds barred. "Look, I’m sorry, out of sorts today; don’t know what’s gotten into me."<br/><br/>"Harry, I know. And it’s alright, so calm down. Make yourself useful instead; go through that little grimoire over there on my desk. There’s information in there I need. Here," she thrust a small piece of parchment at him. "See if you can locate the last known reference of Nev’s cauldron. Snape had it before, but he picked it up on Portobello Road, at Knickknacker’s Emporium. It’s Wizarding, but neither of us know the exact provenance."<br/><br/>"Then why check a book, Hermione?" Harry hauled himself out of the chair he’d been sharing with a half-bushel of other books gingerly, careful not to topple them over. "What else does Snape remember? Did you ask his portrait already?"<br/><br/>"He remembers it was Kreacher that hocked it, that’s what, so the cauldron itself—"<br/><br/>"Was Sirius’s?" Harry came to standstill, spinning about to grip her trailing sleeve tightly. His eyes were very wide behind the lenses. "You’re not joking me, are you, Hermione? That can’t be—I had Kreacher retrieve all the things he and Mundungus sold off. I’m sure of it!"<br/><br/>"Well," Hermione quirked her lips and gave a little shake of her head. "We think so. Certainly Snape believes it, but there’s no proof. It’s not initialed, not even with the Black crest. In any case, he wants you to use it this next Beltane and before we do that, it has to be scanned. We must find out what it’s been used for, before, and if that old bitch Walburga had anything to do with it."<br/><br/>"Why?" Harry let her go, his momentary flare of excitement over finding something more of his godfather’s subsided. He strolled over to Hermione’s desk, where the grimoire in question resided. "Why that one, specifically? Pardon me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall using anything out of the ordinary, Hermione. Why change it now?"<br/><br/>"It’s silver, for one, which causes the Potion to blend more smoothly than the usual blast-proof spell reinforced cast-iron and second…well, second is the chance that it might very well be Sirius’s."<br/><br/>"Really?"<br/><br/>"Really. If it is, then the Black blood heir—Draco—and the Black heir by will—you, Harry—would be employing a far more powerful container. You know how there’s always a trace element, bleeding over? How we don’t use ferrous oxide often because we don’t need to?"<br/><br/>"Hmm-mm," Harry nodded, flipping carefully through the pages of the book she’d set him on. "Go on."<br/><br/>"This would effectively up the power in the actual potion, using a Black family-based magical item. The same bleed principle would be in effect." She grinned at him, over the lectern she’d come to stand before, and the enormous <span class="u">Geographical Locatory Indices for Potions Ingredients, 270<sup>th</sup> Ed.</span> "It would be a serendipitous instance of –"<br/><br/>"Black Magic!" Harry chortled, "Oh my freakin’ Saints, Hermione—that’s atrocious!"<br/><br/>"But true enough, Harry." Hermione sobered up all too quickly, fingers messing about with her armful of carefully stacked, perfectly balanced books, rubbing the cracked spines with affection. "And we need every advantage—every boost we can summon, Harry—you know that. We cannot continue fiddling like this much longer. There’s still only so much give to it; even Professor Snape warned me about that again, recently."<br/><br/>Harry hung his head, blinking quickly, chewing on his lower lip. Hermione laid her books down on a tottery whatnot table, selecting the largest for her lectern and snatching a dog-eared Quik Quills and biro.<br/><br/>"Yeah… I know, Hermione," he admitted. "I know." He glanced up quickly and met her concerned gaze. "You know, I only ever meant for it to be us two—just me and Draco affected—you do know that, don’t you? I never, ever expected it to go this far—"<br/><br/>Hermione smiled reassuringly, patting the notebook she always carried with her, the one she kept her research plans in and any small items she might need to keep in the forefront of her formidable mind; even Hermione had been known to be distracted.<br/><br/>"I know, Harry. Snape, too. And believe me, we’d have stopped you long since if we thought what you and Draco were doing was harmful. But it’s not—so far. We only need to firm up the last adjustments to the Potion and the procedure and then we’ll all be home free."<br/><br/>Harry cocked his head at her, curious. "Hermione, I know you keep a diary and that’s how you track how events have altered. I’d not have known Draco and I were ever still distant after the war and entering Aurors without it, so I’m convinced it’s accurate. But how can you be so sure we’ve not muddled up the lives of any number of other people, doing this? I mean—you and Ron; perhaps you’d not have gotten hitched if—"<br/><br/>"Harry, Harry, Harry," Hermione shook her head and a reproving finger at him. "Stop right there. Shut up for a moment, alright?"<br/><br/>"M’kay," Harry looked chastened. "But, still—"<br/><br/>Hermione forged on, firmly, a decidedly odd mix of exasperation and fond patience settling softly upon her features.<br/><br/>"Harry, I know because <em>I</em> keep the records, and very thorough ones they are, too. The words on the page don’t change, Harry, just as your scars don’t change and neither do the notebooks Snape left us—or Draco’s Mark, for that matter. The Half-Blood Prince’s textbook is still here in this reality, still intact, Harry. It’s a thing, an object, and time simply flows over it, rather."<br/><br/>"I’d’ve thought they would—" Harry objected, but Hermione didn’t stop.<br/><br/>"I mean to say, perhaps in one life they’re nothing but stray tattoos and off-print fantasy novels, perhaps in another they are the real relics of real events—but it doesn’t matter a whit to what’s actually been written—or printed. It still <em>is</em>; the change, Harry, lies in how it’s perceived, whatever it is. Not in the object itself. There might be some really minute changes, details on the molecular level or even the atomic, but for the most part and from the observations I’ve made, the structure stays intact. You and Draco are just, er, fudging the details a bit—tweaking the big picture, you see?"<br/><br/>"Oh…well, when you put it like that—" Harry nodded slowly. "I do see, now—er, but, Hermione…"<br/><br/>"Right! It’s like—like a carpet, okay? For instance, Harry, every time you and Draco pick up the road of Time like a bloody rug and shake it out to clear the wrinkles, a million myriad details change all about you both, courtesy of the temporal shift—I know that, empirically, even I’ve no memory left of exactly how it used to be, alright? The changes are tiny, microscopic even, but they are real enough—and I’ve a record of them. It’s almost like fossils, Harry. They’re still there, clear as day, whether the Muggles deny evolution or not. Great whomping huge sauropod, Harry—think Dracorex hogwartsia, alright?—big bones, huge chompers, all that. You’re modifying maybe a tiny bone in the toes or even the colour of the hide, you and Draco—that’s all. Dracorex is still extant, though—that’s not an issue."<br/><br/>"But that’s precisely what I’m saying, Hermione!" Harry surged round the desk, both hands spread wide. "What if we’re fucking things up by tiny bits-and-pieces and we don’t even know it? What then? If we play around with the toes on your bloody fossil, Hermione, eventually the poor beast won’t have been able to balance properly, if it were still even alive--because one more alteration might be one too many--"<br/><br/>"Harry," Hermione interrupted softly. "It’s alright. It really is. I keep thorough, meticulous and above all accurate records, Harry, no matter which <em>when</em> I’m in; it’s a part of me that doesn’t seem to change, that. It’s what I do; who I am. Just like Draco has a flash-point temper and Ron a worse one, okay? And you fret, Harry, and then rush off hell for leather and just do it, whatever it is. But Harry, I observe, as well, all this time--these <em>times</em>, rather. I’m always very keen to see what goes on around me, how people are reacting—whether they’re content or whether they’re not."<br/><br/>"Yeah? And?" Harry cocked an eyebrow, visibly skeptical. "Which plays into this how, Hermione?"<br/><br/>"Harry, for every specific time you and Draco have brewed this Potion, the people in our world have only been the more content, after. First it was a widespread feeling of forgiveness for the Death Eater families—the ones who were caught up in it and dragged along—then it was new laws, new ways of integrating the Muggleborns with the Purebloods, the next time you brewed Snape’s potion. Last time—this time, Harry, this now—Draco’s your partner and no one bats an eyelash. But all of it’s been positive, Harry, all along—every little change you’ve made by the wayside in your attempt to right your own situation. There are fewer crimes reported, there’s less hate—people are <em>smiling</em>, Harry. People aren’t suffering just so you can have what you want—and yes, I know you’re concerned over that, Harry," she smiled at his parted mouth and half-raised hand. "But you don’t have to be, because it’s alright—really, it <em>is</em>. I wouldn’t let you do this if it wasn’t, count on it. None of the ‘me’s that have ever existed would. Keep that in mind, as it’s true—oh, and neither would Snape, Harry. He’d have your bollocks if he thought you were truly pursuing a course of disaster—and you know that, too."<br/><br/>"Hermione! You really think so?"<br/><br/>Harry, who’d stopped in his tracks to frown at her, listening closely, impelled his body forward in a sudden rush, nearly toppling the lectern as he dodged ‘round it. He grabbed up his best mate with both arms and spun her ‘round, both laughing breathlessly, eyes bright—starry in the cozy, gas-lamp lit study.<br/><br/>"Really? Really, truly?"<br/><br/>Hermione giggled down at him, feet dangling. She kicked them finally, catching him in the shin.<br/><br/>"Yes! Now, put me down, Harry; we’ve a job of work to do!"</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Part the Third: Interregnum</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>Part the Third: Interregnum</b><br/>Love is a garden of thorns</p><p></p><div>
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    <em>Love's garden of thorns, how it grows</em>
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</div><p><br/>And a crow in the corn</p><p></p><div>
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    <em>Black crow in the corn hummin' low</em>
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</div><p><br/>And the brake growing wild</p><p></p><div>
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    <em>Brake nettle so pretty and wild</em>
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    <em>And thistles surround the edge of the</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>Cold when the summer is spent</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>Dim dark hour as the sun moves away</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>In the jade heart's lament</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>Lamenting a lost summer day</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>For the faith of a child</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>Who nurtures the faith of a child</em>
    <br/>
    <em>When nothing remains to cover her eyes?</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>My body has a number and my face has a name</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>My body has a number, maybe my face has a name</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>And each day looks the same to me</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>Each hour like each hour before</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>But love is a voice on the wind</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>This longing is a voice on the wind</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>And the wages of sin</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>She cultivates the wages of sin</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/>And a tanglewood tree</p><p></p><div>
  <p>
    <em>In a tanglewood tree</em>
  </p>
</div><p><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Thorn</b></span><br/><br/>The lavatory in the Auror corridor was deserted for the moment, but it wouldn’t be for long. Aurors and their satellites would be spilling out of meetings shortly, eager to rush off to their assigned tasks, and the room would see a stream of rapid visitors, in and out, slamming stall doors and splashing water.<br/><br/>For the moment, though, there was only the faint steady drip from a boggart-infested faucet and the sound of Draco’s heart, thudding, as he lay in wait. This would be Potter’s first stop and Draco planned to be ready—he planned an outright assault, which would earn him at least five in Azkaban if anyone learnt of it—but Potter would never breathe a word against him.<br/><br/>Potter was his assigned partner and Potter was unflinchingly loyal, even if he didn’t like one, much. Or perhaps it was more even when he liked one too much for his own peace of mind and easily jostled Gryffindor sensibilities.<br/><br/>Potter had avoided Draco assiduously in recent months. That, Draco determined, would end today. No more of this crap would be tolerated. He’d had enough; Potter was officially separated from the Weasleyette; Draco and Astoria’s marriage had always been in name only. There was no good reason not to, now.<br/><br/>Not a single decent reason not to.<br/><br/>His patience was rewarded almost in the next blink. Harry came bursting through the metal door, banging it carelessly, hand already on his flies. Draco sprang, using the momentum of Harry’s body to twist him sideways and carry them both into the stall farthest from the door. He flung a silencing and locking ward over his shoulder as he did so, ignoring Harry’s pop-eyed gasp, and launched into his attack immediately, not allowing Harry even a split second to gather his wits.<br/><br/>"Prick," Draco accused. "You’re a bloody tease, Potter!" he gritted, snorting as he shoved the slighter man up against the chill metal wall. "Bending over, dropping case files, flirting with every secretary!"<br/><br/>"Fuck off, Malfoy!" Potter yelped, squirming frantically. "Take your filthy hands off me—accosting me; no sane reason for it—<em>where</em> the fuck d’<em>you</em>?"<br/><br/>"I have plenty of reason for it, Potter," Draco bit each word off and bloody chewed it before he spat each out. "I have more than enough reasons to shag your pretty little arse and you bleeding well know it, Harry, even if you’re as twice as thick as you look like! Take your fucking trousers down. <em>Now, </em>Harry. It’s time we sorted this," he ordered grimly. Went to do it himself when Potter only stared at him, slack-jawed. "Past time."<br/><br/>"Wha-what? No! I won’t, Malfoy! Sod off!"<br/><br/>"No, Harry," Draco snarled, "we <em>will</em> sort this, right here and right now. I’m not waiting a moment longer than I’ve had to!"<br/><br/>"I am a married man, Malfoy!" Potter sputtered. "Get yourself away from me, alright? I’m not here to be your whipping boy, you whomping great tool! Take your hands off! <em>Now</em>!"<br/><br/>Draco chuckled, evil and gravelly-rough in the antiseptic air. The metal-walled stalls echoed with the unpleasant sound of it. He sounded a real villain; a homewrecker; it left him flinching in his wake, his own voice.<br/><br/>But he kept on, dogged. Mad dog, more like—because, wasn’t he?<br/><br/>"I don’t give a flying fuck, Potter, if you’re married or not—I’m married, too, or have you conveniently forgotten?" Draco had undone Potter’s belt, fighting off his batting hands and scratching fingernails, secure in the knowledge Harry hadn’t thought to grab his wand from its arm holster once in all this scuffling flurry. Not once! "And we’ve obligations to the kids and our wives and the fucking public and—and you know <em>what</em>, Potter?" he asked, conversationally—casually as fuck.<br/><br/>"<em>What</em>, you arse?!" Potter had ceased his pointless struggles to keep his pants to goggle up at him, going still. Draco grinned maliciously, one brow so highly arched it could likely fly off, like a boomerang.<br/><br/>"I find I don’t care. I don’t<em> care</em>—I want <em>this</em>, Potter, and <em>you</em> want this and we’re damned well going to have it!"<br/><br/>"Malfoy!"<br/><br/>"You almost died today, Harry—you will <em>not</em> die without me shagging you first," Draco informed him summarily, brooking no argument. "You will not."<br/><br/>"I! You! <em>Git</em>!"<br/><br/>The woolen trousers, belt and the plain plaid cotton boxers Harry wore beneath them had been dropped summarily, falling from Draco’s slender fingers. He stared at flexing thighs, almost drooling over them like a bloody schoolboy, excepting that his jawbone was clamped too hard to his skull bone to allow anything so pathetic as saliva to escape his tight-shut teeth. Skin, tinted faint gold above the navel and bloody cream below beckoned him. A half swollen prick bobbed, its mushroom head inflamed. Potter might say ‘no’ to it but Draco would never be so foolish as to actually<em> listen</em> to him. Potter mouthed all manner of things that were nothing but bald-faced lies, in the end, for such an honest man. Potter was a two-faced, Parseltongued git, who made an Auror uniform look like a bloody negligee to be ripped off and whose perpetual scowl for his partner was the sexiest thing in the goddamned known universe. Draco was tired of resisting; no more would he, either!<br/><br/>"Draco, stop!" Harry pleaded—grunted, really, but Draco could care less. "Draco!"<br/><br/>They weren’t attracted to each other, like metal filings to magnets: bull-fucking-<em>shite</em>! Draco was so attracted to Harry he’d bloody well worn his foreskin thin with manual abuse. And idiot git Harry—Mister Auror <em>Potter</em>—spent every spare second he’d available watching his unwanted work partner surreptitiously, from this angle and that, and Draco was positive beyond doubt that wasn’t only suspicion colouring his jade eyes a deeper hue of toad-green. It was lust—and Draco knew lust like palm of his well-kept wand hand.<br/><br/>And not lust only. Not just flesh—no!<br/><br/>"Draco—just—no—<em>no</em>, you can’t!" Harry moaned, his neck wet and reddened from teeth and tongue. It was vicious and nasty and fuck, it felt marvellous! "Draco, please!"<br/><br/>"—arry!" Draco groaned, and only ramped up his efforts towards getting them skin-to-skin soonest. Harry was begging; he adored a begging Harry. His skin pricked hot and cold with the sensation; his head swam.<br/><br/>They were both accounted for, neatly pegged, being husbands and fathers—and that was shite and crap and yet more <em>crap</em>, heaped up and redolent of subterfuge of the worst sort, for Draco’s marriage was arranged and Harry had only ever asked the Weasley wench to be his blushing bride because he’d no clue how to go about getting himself children out of the deal otherwise. Weasel--that loudmouth ginger bastard--had never bothered to let his best mate in on what other Wizards did when they were in the same situation—oh, no! ‘Good old Ron’ had stood back and let the train wreck happen! Granger hadn’t lifted a finger to stop it, either, all those years ago when she could’ve if she’d just applied that grey matter she was so proud of-- and only because she’d never thought there were options. Bloody Muggleborns! Yet another stellar reason to educate these fucking halfbloods, who didn’t know their arses from holes in the ground! Draco, when he finally realized what had actually happened to them—why Harry had dropped him like rock--had stormed variously to both Granger <em>and</em> Snape after—and they’d both only nodded at him sympathetically and let him rant on unimpeded—far too late to be of any real use!<br/><br/>And why was it he could speak so reasonably with Granger and not with Potter Draco couldn’t quite fathom, but this act would change that. He’d upset the applecart but well and but good, this time—he’d not be ignored again. Potter would<em> not</em> shut him out!<br/><br/>This would happen; this was always going to happen—staving off the inevitable wasn’t cutting it, not any longer.<br/><br/>"Please—just <em>listen</em> to me, sod it!"<br/><br/>Harry settled his flailing hands on Draco’s forearms finally, shoving him back, ripping his mouth away by main force. "This is wrong," he panted furiously, cheeks red as fire, his specs steamy. "What you’re—<em>we’re</em>—doing here, it’s not right! This is a sin, Draco—I am married to Gin, still—I’m not about to betray her!"<br/><br/>"Hah!" Draco pounced, having managed his own flies finally, with fumbling sweat-slippery fingers that trembled and palsied hands. He ripped Harry’s shirt apart as he spat obscenities, the pinging buttons a counterpoint to rage. "Fuck that shite, Harry—she doesn’t love you, git! Not the way you need her to, Harry—not the way I <em>do</em>!"<br/><br/>"No!" Harry shook his head furiously, "oh, no! You’re not feeding me that line of crap, Malfoy—you’re bloody well not! She’s loved me since we were both kids—she’s told me so, time and time again, and I—this isn’t even my choice, this divorce! She’s the one that wants it, Draco! I’d never choose to abandon my kids!"<br/><br/>"So’ve I, Harry," Draco hissed, and buried his mouth against Harry’s open one. "Loved you! And <em>she’s</em> divorcing <em>you</em>, git, don’t forget—on grounds of adultery; her own!" he added triumphantly. "Now tell me who’s the one who won’t screw you over, Harry—because it sure as shite isn’t Ginny Weasley! It was never Weasley for you, Harry!"<br/><br/>"No—and<em> no</em>. Draco…Draco, you mustn’t; really, we can’t," Harry was obdurate yet, straining every muscle that wasn’t under Draco’s grabby hands. And some that were, which felt most excellent. "There’s the kids and the press and—and—I simply can’t and you <em>mustn’t</em> ask me--"<br/><br/>Draco laughed, a peal of disbelief that echoed in the silenced lav.<br/><br/>"Oh, no—<em>I’m </em>not backing down now, Harry. Not a sodding chance—and you should know better than to even ask it of me! What they don’t know won’t hurt them, Harry, and this happens to be the most carefully guarded building in the Wizarding world. Safer than Hogwarts—safer than your own backyard, Harry! If we can’t do this here and not be caught out at it, then we might as well go off and die—and that’s not something I’m willing to do, Harry. Not without shagging your arse—not without having you first. I’ve waited this long by the skin of my teeth, damn it—no longer!’<br/><br/>Harry shut his eyes, staunch against Draco’s biting mouth, which nipped about his jaw and pursed lips like pestering flies—only far more appealing than they could ever be. He shook his head; once, twice—and kept his mouth stubbornly closed.<br/><br/>"I—I don’t want it," he growled, through taut, tight-clamped lips, "not this way, Draco. Not like this! All harem-scarum in the toilets, where anyone might walk in! It’s sordid, Draco, that’s what."<br/><br/>"I don’t care, Harry," Draco licked his fingers, sopping them up with saliva, and thrust them down and then up again, probing. Harry flinched. "We can do it in the Atrium—we can fuck in the mud before Hogwarts’ main gate, Harry—I don’t care. We will fuck anyway, no matter what you say you will or won’t countenance. May as well do it now, yeah?"<br/><br/>He inserted a slippery forefinger carefully, his actions completely at odds with the demonic roll of his burning grey eyes or the challenge in his tone.<br/><br/>"Right now. No more waiting, Harry—no more. I can’t stand it."<br/><br/>"Draco!" Harry’s gaze had changed from pleading and angry to despairing. "Draco, please just wait—we’ll sort it, I promise." He nodded his head frantically, hips pressed as much as he possibly could manage against the wall. "Snape says—"<br/><br/>"I know all about Snape, Harry," Draco interrupted, thrusting in a second finger and kneeing apart Harry’s legs to spread them. "What? Did you think I wouldn’t?" he scoffed, when Harry’s eyes widened in surprise.<br/><br/>"I—but you—" Harry blurted. "There’s a way, Draco—we can do this properly, you know? It doesn’t have to be like this—"<br/><br/>"No," Draco was adamantine, stony, excepting his fingers, buried in Harry to the second knuckle were not nearly that stiff. "No. We shag first, Harry. Then we’ll brew Snape’s damned potion and follow through on all that rigmarole that’s part and parcel—but we shag first and we do it now. Right now. I will not risk not doing this right now."<br/><br/>When he spread his fingers at last, wide and searching, Harry slumped against him, still murmuring faint objections, yes, but the fight was gone out of him. Draco struggled to keep them both balanced, locking his knees.<br/><br/>When he tickled Harry’s prostate with the curved edge of perfectly buffed nail, coated thick with magical lube, Harry came alive in his arms, scrambling madly to get a leg up, shoving his eager hole against Draco’s damp palm, humping it. His face was screwed up in a horrible grimace—almost ugly, especially with those horrid spec frames and his hair sweaty and his chin wet from where Draco had gnawed on it earlier.<br/><br/>Almost ugly—but not. No, never. Not inside, where Draco needed to be.<br/><br/>"Harry," Draco rumbled, "Harry, alright there?" It had been maybe just too easy, Harry’s surrender…he didn’t trust it. "Harry." Not that he’d ever stop now.<br/><br/>"Fuck off, Draco," Harry’s voce came faintly; he’d his funny face buried into the space between Draco’s chin and his collarbone. "And get on. If you’re doing this, than you’d bloody well better be serious about it, that’s all. Do it."<br/><br/>"I, Harry," Draco replied calmly, ripping his fingers out and pulling more lube out of thin air. He was ginning like a loon. Maybe it was just that easy…had been all along.<br/><br/>"Have never," he went on, slicking up his waiting dick and smoothing back the foreskin, "Budge up, now—there you go; good-oh—"<br/><br/>"Arse," Harry whispered, but he complied, nonetheless.<br/><br/>"Been more serious," Draco added, lining up and prodding that small pinkened ring gingerly with the blunt end of his cock; therein lay the portal to better days. Fire to warm him, that’s all. A necessity, like air.<br/><br/>"Now, prat!" Harry growled, scowling, "Do it now and stop your endless rabbiting on—"<br/><br/>"In my life!" Draco cried out—and thrust home, sure and deep.<br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Willow Whips, Stripped of Bark</b></span><br/><br/>Draco and his parents were flanked with Aurors as they emerged from the Wizengamot chamber; the trials after the fall of Voldemort had been telescoped in their furious intensity and were exhausting, but--amazingly enough--were not the worst thing that could’ve ever happened. At the bitter end of them he was free; they were free, even Father.<br/><br/>He was grateful; he was as well filled to the brim with accumulated tension and beyond strung-out on the endless talking, talking, talking: the battering-ram verbiage of others: countless lips that moved and flexed and spat out incident and example—even Potter, who’d risen to their defense repeatedly—and thus Draco didn’t comprehend clearly what was happening when Harry Potter came tumbling out of the chamber directly after he and his parents passed through (his little tight-knit knot of nuclear family, staunch against world and tremulously triumphant) and accosted them. He understood even less than absolute zero when Potter stopped their uneasy crabways tack towards the Floo bank with no more than a murmured word and a feather-light touch to Draco’s elbow.<br/><br/>Wordless and smiling, Potter was. Draco marveled at the expression on Potter’s face; it was a strange, ethereal half grin. More a quirk of the lips than anything else and one that hinted at shared relief and shared grief combined—and then the boy who’d saved them all trumped that act of singular strangeness by extending his work-worn hands to Narcissa Malfoy. She grasped them quickly and without the slightest hesitation—smiling broadly in reply, for all the world as if this was a natural event!<br/><br/>Draco fell back a step or two to watch them, gawping like the veriest ape, as Harry Potter was gathered into a hurried embrace by his own mother—and then, upon his release, had a hand firmly captured and shaken heartily by his own father!<br/><br/>It was beyond anything, this. He was appalled.<br/><br/>"Mr. Potter," Lucius Malfoy was deathly serious, thin lips pale and trembling, his gaze red-rimmed and damp at the corners. He stared at Potter with a fervor in those grey eyes that marked him as undeniable sire to Draco and Draco stared at them both, flummoxed, lips parted despite the fact he might gibber at any moment over that smile—that embrace—that handshake. "Mr. Potter, thank you."<br/><br/>This couldn’t be, Draco thought. His eyes deceived him. He’d stepped into some other reality. Alice, wasn’t it? The Muggle who’d gone and fallen down the rabbit hole? Well, he was now on more than a nodding acquaintance with the likes of the Red Queen and that barmy lot of talking what’sits.<br/><br/>More than.<br/><br/>"Harry," Draco’s mother added, and she was so…so overjoyed to be given this moment of mutual admiration, it was apparent. Draco gawked. "Oh, Harry. Yes, thank you."<br/><br/>"…You," Potter murmured and beamed. At them all, like some great noddy.<br/><br/>Draco had never before glimpsed an expression quite like that arise upon his mother’s normally composed features; to gaze upon it now was a revelation. And Potter? In what universe did his parents and Potter rub along like houses afire? Had he hit his head, unknowing? Perhaps on the doorframe, on the way out?<br/><br/>No, really. What had happened? What had gone on whilst he’d not been watching? Whilst he’d been left stunned on the edges of the Forbidden Forest, bowled over by the fact he was breathing?<br/><br/>And after. After Draco had come to himself, still aghast that he yet lived, there’d been Potter’s epic battle with the Dark Lord: the fall of the Death Eaters, finally and forever. So much blood; so much wailing after that final, telling, dust-mote filled silence. He and his family, briefly united, were then taken into custody by the Aurors in the grey chill of a June dawn and only the scent of burning timbers and drying blood comprised his last fitful memories of Hogwarts. And Potter, of course. Potter, grimy and white as a sheet and besmirched with bruises, burns and scrapes and other people’s deaths—his own, as well. Draco had snuck as many glances at him as he could manage, curious as to the disposition of everyone’s saviour when it was over. He’d been so very…curious. That was it—curious. Nothing more, really. Nothing more was allowed, was it?<br/><br/>He was also firmly on the other side of the fence; so much so it was bloody ridiculous, despite Potter’s rhetoric. And he’d planted himself there, no question.<br/><br/>Draco closed his eyes against relentless memory unfolding.<br/><br/>It had been a blur, the days after that, a waking dream…no, a nightmare, Draco recalled, every small event buffeting his whisper-thin air of calm. Azkaban overnight at first, then holding cells at the Ministry, cheerless and cold, then a welcome release into Auror-monitored custody after three days of no news whatsoever and then—at last--a much needed permission to return to his home, in the company of his parents. The shell of it, rather, for not only had the Dark Lord obviously been, so had the Auror corps. The manor was a shambles, like Draco’s interior.<br/><br/>NO—there’d been no structural damage, really, not beyond a few tipped out drawers and toppled whatnots; burn holes here and there and some spilt blood in the dungeons, but there’d been an indefinable, unshakeable sense of invasion, as if all that was Malfoy had been fully undermined. Draco shut his teeth with a snap on the idea of allowing anything further to cut up his peace. The Manor, like Draco, was irreparably altered.<br/><br/>And it had been, truly. All the gilt was worn away; the bloom had faded. Even the peacocks’ tails were dulled and drab, dragged low behind them. What remained was only three people: a father, a mother and a son, wandering the echoing spaces and tentatively setting back to rights the remnants of destruction and always close by one another, as if none of them could bear to be parted for even ten minutes apace. Draco had known instantly he wouldn’t be able to be separate, at least. Perhaps that did indeed mean he was a filthy coward.<br/><br/>Perhaps it only meant he loved his parents and they, him.<br/><br/>Then the Trials. Lucius’s Summoning to appear before the Wizengamot had been delivered by the Auror Dawlish; Draco’s by Kingsley Shacklebolt, whom he recalled vaguely as a great benign power, looming massively on the fringes from the halcyon days he’d regularly visited his all-powerful father in his Ministry offices. When they were escorted to that lofty place of law and order, with his mother tagging along to provide material witness, Shacklebolt and Dawlish and the rest of that lot who carried them Side-Along were grim-jowled and quiet. If there was favour to be curried, it was demonstrably not to be had from a disgraced Malfoy.<br/><br/>The Trials themselves were short and brutal. Twelve hours a day each of testimony, sometimes with the aid of Veritaserum, sometimes without. They were each questioned by more experts than Draco cared to count; he could recite the horrid events that led up to his repair of the Cabinet in his sleep, after. Had it down rote, like a recitation in Potions. He could tell the story of his denial of Potter’s identity without hesitation. He was able to relate the taking of his wand and Potter’s amazing escape via the hand of the renegade house elf, Dobby, with some hint of acerbic flare. He could even—without flinching too much—recall what Aunt Bella had done to poor Granger. How he’d been tucked away in the one corner during it, wanting desperately to retch and not being able to, for fear she’d kill either Granger or himself without another thought given to the matter. Aunt Bella had been a nightmare, and even her memory provoked them.<br/><br/>No, Draco only ever stumbled a bit over the details of their well-used dungeons and what he had done there at the Dark Lord’s behest, in the months previous to the final battle. And at Hogwarts, too, under the heel of the horrible, horrible Carrow twins. It galled him, yet, to have been that pisspoor and spineless, but Draco knew, now, what it was to feel utterly at a loss and hopeless. That lesson had been ingrained permanently.<br/><br/>Over all, the madness of the Trials—the ongoing testimony, the witnesses and Focussing Pensieves and doubled-up and tripled-up cross-examination by Wizengamot prosecutors, the huge gabble and fuss—had been benighted by this great pall of unreality. At least in Draco’s opinion. It was Fiendfyre all over again: a huge rush and roar and then, bearing down upon him like a vise the horrid inevitability of Potter’s rescue of them. All of them, even Lucius.<br/><br/>Well, not poor Crabbe. But Father, yes. Draco still gulped bile over the memory of his father poised on the stand, that mostly repentant version of the proud Lucius Malfoy, his adamantine Pureblood aspirations done to a final, merciful death—even he had come tumbling down from his high horse and fallen grateful at the tips of Potter’s perpetually scuffed trainers, in spirit if not in actuality.<br/><br/>Even Lucius.<br/><br/>If he knew his son had fallen long ago? What then?<br/><br/>"I—you," Draco breathed, when it was at last his turn to face this intransigent new version of Potter; when Potter finally turned away from Draco’s cautiously joyful parents—Narcissa’s bright eyes; Lucius’s determined air of humbled gratitude and trembling fingers—and faced him dead square and palms thrust forward. Draco feasted on that face; he couldn’t help himself, not at this one particular moment, and Potter was just so fecking reassuring, so achingly familiar standing before him, hair stuck out where he’d run his fingers through it, clad unfashionably in last year’s spiffed up school robes and hastily polished rubber-soled Muggle shoes. Somehow they were still a bit scuffed on the soles and heels; it lent Draco the heart to open his mouth and pour out his own thanks—or so he honestly intended. The Potter Draco knew was always a bit raggedy ‘round the edges and at least some things remained the same. It lent Draco a much-needed boost, that.<br/><br/>Maybe the gap between them wasn’t as wide as it could be. Potter was paused right here before him, wasn’t he? Whoever could’ve booked the odds for that?<br/><br/>Indeed, Draco could almost imagine Professor Snape appearing out of the mythical blue and cautioning them both with threats of enforced detention. He could taste silver polish in the air and hear the snap and pop of Hogwarts sconce light. Smell mud and unicorn blood and feel the familiar tang of pumpkin juice on his tongue.<br/><br/>Those were the days.<br/><br/>He blinked furiously as a wave of nostalgia crashed through him. Here was Potter, and here was the living symbol of his former life, still standing green-eyed before him, unbowed and smiling Draco’s way somewhat tentatively, as if it were Draco who was the rather intimidating stranger. As if. Did Potter really believe Draco would deny him now? Ridiculous! Preposterous.<br/><br/>"You…" he began. "I."<br/><br/>There weren’t sufficiently articulate words to express what dwelt within him; Draco fought for composure under the searching stare he knew so well. Then again…would he be hexed? Would he be spat upon? Would Potter denounce him yet, as both fool and a traitor? It was possible. He’d done some fairly bilious things in the name of survival.<br/><br/>Or…<br/><br/>Not?<br/><br/>"Draco," Potter murmured softly and hustled up against Draco’s chest, with those well-remembered hands flailing, sporting bitten-to-the-quick nails and a more than bountiful variety of scrapes, scars and burns. Hands that had whisked him from a dire, ignominious end more than once. "Draco," he repeated, ever so softly, like a lover—not a fighter--and Draco’s own name rolling across Potter’s tongue was foreign to him. Alien. Had he not been Malfoy for the better part of their long acquaintance?<br/><br/>He’d put all of that aside, deliberately, the night Professor Burbage was slain—their acquaintance and its many mid-stream changes. Had frantically gone on his hands and knees, digging deep into his wardrobe to locate the child’s Pensieve his Aunt Bella had given him and had then stuffed it to the fucking brim with every last memory of he who’d also been Harry.<br/><br/>"Draco," Potter was saying, and Draco thought it had to be almost another method of taunting him with what was past. He’d made a choice, long ago, and had perforce stuck by it, hadn’t he? There was no ‘Draco’ and no ‘Harry’; there was still only Potter and Malfoy.<br/><br/>"Draco!" Potter’s hands were coming towards him like juggernauts; Draco flinched in reaction and then stilled as the first touch of fingertips landed on his person. "Please?"<br/><br/>"What?" How to respond to that? Draco ignored the fact his voice was a thready, reedy disaster and concentrated on the heat of Potter, who was practically plastered to his front, forcing the air right out of his laboring lungs. "What."<br/><br/>"Please."<br/><br/>"Al-alright. If you want." Could only be this, right? The final heroic gesture, in line politically with all that Potter had said and done for the Malfoy family during their part of the Trials.<br/><br/>Potter wanted to shake hands, finally. It was only to be expected. Probably there was a reporter lurking about, ready to report it.<br/><br/>Draco, blinking rapidly, extended his wand hand, carefully bringing it forward and out the merest distance, all at once of the firm impression that perhaps this time—this crucial moment—Potter might be willing to clasp it. To allow bygones be bygones and let life continue on. What else could that ‘Please’ possibly mean, right?<br/><br/>Yes, now—this moment—they would go through the motions of a gentlemanly handshake and be done with it. And Draco would be free forever, ergo. No more regrets; no more might-have-beens. It was past, over and finished, all of it, and perhaps now Potter’s near patent joy over the fact of simple survival, his glee over all these mad acts of his blanket forgiveness (how many was it that had wronged Potter, for that matter?), over this brand new and unbelievable freedom from the threat of Voldemort would take precedence over all the past they two shared and they could—at last—make a sort of uneasy peace. For Draco was tired, oh, so tired. He didn’t want nor need to be yet another humble supplicant before the people’s god that was Harry Potter; he needed no more dark clouds of utter obeisance owed at the tender age of eighteen years.<br/><br/>So deathly tired. Of mostly everything, even gratitude.<br/><br/>"Draco, I’m so glad," Potter whispered, his voice also reedy and broken up by the tiniest hint of tears. Instead of politely taking hold of the fingers Draco extended so terribly cautiously, so dreadfully nervously, he grasped firmly instead at Draco’s tensed forearms, both of them, with two matching sets of palpably trembling fingers. Draco braced himself; attempting to remain still and give off the expression of one suitably grateful.<br/><br/>But…then, leaving go as quickly as he squeezed them, Potter lunged forward, burrowing against Draco, wrapped his boyishly thin arms ‘round Draco’s chest and middle like steely bands of Incarcerous. As if he’d never leave go, gripping Draco’s heaving chest tight and hard and just as if he meant to ground Draco to this moment for ever after.<br/><br/>"Mmph!" Draco choked, the wind literally squeezed out of him. Potter, for his unfed appearance, was a strong little bastard.<br/><br/>He staggered yet another step backwards, his back fetching up against a convenient wall with a solidly humiliating thump. "P-Potter?"<br/><br/>"Draco," Potter said again, on a fade-away sigh, and Draco blinked helplessly over the unruly head full of tumbled sooty hair that tickled his unfortunate nose, only to be confronted with the stern, set faces of both Granger and Weasley staring at him.<br/><br/>Oh, bloody fuck; he’d forgotten them: Potter’s mates, his own tribal clan, who’d both taken it upon themselves to follow closely behind Potter when he’d exited the Wizengamot chamber. They stood silent and observing at the moment, their young bodies drawn protectively near him and Potter, both, as if to form a battlement wall between him and Potter and the rest of reality. Granger’s slim hand rested perilously near her wand holster, though, as if she suspected yet that Draco might yet give into the urge to do Potter harm.<br/><br/>As if he would ever! Really…as if he’d even dare, or even wish to. Not hardly. Not so much, no. Even if Potter was infuriating, Draco wouldn’t. Couldn’t.<br/><br/>Not.<br/><br/>But Draco couldn’t fault either of them, Potter’s mates. If he’d been in their shoes he’d not leave Harry for a moment, either, not even to pop off to the lav. He’d not be able to endure being parted by more than a yard or two at the utmost, nor would he allow Harry out of his sight for even an instant. He’d keep him safe as houses and coddle him in cotton wool and always, always…<br/><br/>But…then again, Draco recalled, he was demonstrably not in their shoes and Harry was not his to watch over. All was as it had ever been; nothing substantial had changed, really.<br/><br/>Needless to say, Draco didn’t expect much from this moment, either, not practically—this virtual standoff they had in motion. Not with Granger and Weasley watching the situation from but a few steps distant, chins cocked and eyes cool, for all the world like alchemists eying up a potentially volatile brew. No. More like twinned bloody Sphinxes, calmly deliberating the fate of the odd traveler. His parents, Draco noted curiously, weren’t included in their placid assessment, though Draco could feel the weight of their eyes upon him in addition. No…it was only Draco Potter’s mates had specifically targeted—Draco, helplessly in process of being assaulted by an addled Potter.<br/><br/>He was the cynosure of practically every gaze at large in the echoing, nearly deserted gunmetal grey painted corridor—only excepting Potter’s, but then Potter was far too up close and personal at the moment to actually stare at Draco. Well, maybe <em>he</em> could eyeball individual parts of Draco from his restricted vantage point, such as Draco’s neck or his jaw, but that was immaterial.<br/><br/>Draco gulped; he’d not expected such overt scrutiny to continue, now that the Trials had finished. The Malfoy family had been deemed free to go. The Wizengamot had pronounced his and his father’s sentences clearly, for all to hear and take note. It would trumpeted about the papers and all the denouncers and zealots would be forced to give over—Draco knew that. Father would finish out his time in prison and then be placed on probation. As for him, he was a minor and one who’d been constrained to act by Voldemort’s threats against his parent’s lives and that was the nub of it, for all his foolishly arrogant spouting off for years over the pathetic fallibilities of Mudbloods. His ultimate crime had been blind Pureblood pride and an excess of arrogance, and maybe too in believing he could save his family’s lives all by his lonesome.<br/><br/>Clearly, he’d been mistaken. Draco Malfoy was not hero material. It had taken one Harry Potter to save anyone, including Draco’s parents—including himself.<br/><br/>His chest literally hurt with the burn of Potter nestled against it. Draco shifted uncomfortably, wincing. What he recalled and what he expected had no place co-existing.<br/><br/>Really, he needed to end this moment. Potter surely had to be over his unexpected hands-on gesture of goodwill, right? Soon? Like very soon, please Merlin, because this was painful, this embrace.<br/><br/>The ache was intense and almost cruel, within him. Like a hot wind blowing on a scratched-open wound, it seared even as the raw edges curled.<br/><br/>Draco wasn’t sure what he’d done lately to deserve Potter’s attentions…and too, there was bloody Granger eying him like a hawk, Potter’s maybe, could be, on-again, off-again girlfriend, with her expression set still as a millpond and as bland as dairy cream, her rather pretty but pale features firm and immobile. And there slouched that bloody ginger menace Weasley, rocking back and forth on his heels like a bleeding sailor on deck, his freckled hands tucked into his robe’s pockets just as a common workman would; banner hair and blue eyes brilliant counters to the drab cold grey of the Ministry’s décor.<br/><br/>Weasley, the cod, Draco’s opposite number and his ultimate surpassor in the arena of Potter’s affections, and now incomprehensibly echoing Draco’s slight helpless shrug of befuddlement. Daring to be silently sympathetic as Draco stood there, hapless, mouth open uselessly silent and feeling like a Granian’s hindquarters, wondering what in Hades’ name he was supposed to do with a warm armful of Harry Potter.<br/><br/>Hold tighter? Leave go?<br/><br/>He’d never thought to feel this familiar ache again; no, not for what felt like—was—years, now.<br/><br/>It was years, wasn’t it?<br/><br/>Draco could literally feel Harry’s heart thudding; it matched his own in pace and hurry, thundering away like mad inside him. It was a clock ticking, he knew, measuring out the time left before he cracked altogether and gathered Harry against him—into him—with a grateful noise and ready tears. Draco could feel it gathering, the all-too-familiar prickle, warning him.<br/><br/>He inhaled sharply. His nose dipped automatically and his eyes closed against the mind-melting sight of a sympathetic Weasley, even as he tried to keep the lids from doing such a foolish thing as falling of their own volition. But they—he—couldn’t prevent it. His eyes simply had to close, to better allow his avid appreciation of all that was Harry.<br/><br/>Draco recalled Harry, despite the Pensieve. How many nights had he lain in bed at home or at Hogwarts, a forefinger tracing the empty space where Harry would’ve been if their lives had been altered even a little? Chin, nose, lips, scar, hair a bird’s nest and there for his touch, laid out and willing? How many nights had he gotten up to pace the carpets; to scour his mind of the lingering traces that would doom him in an instant, were the Dark Lord to see? A closet full of bottles and he was still vulnerable as a baby. Potter-struck. Harry’d.<br/><br/>One couldn’t, Draco had discovered, perform a respectable self-Obliviate, which is what he’d really required. Harry was never fully gone from him, no matter how much he desired him to be departed, the wanker. Then, as now, Harry smelt good—he smelt of something Draco hadn’t tasted on his tongue for such a very long time. Years, definitely. Salt and sweat and the lingering remnants of tea and tobacco (the Wizengamot contained more than its fair share of pipe smokers) and the drab black cloth of Hogwarts school robes, which always were scented with the tiniest traces of chalk and ink and lye soap.<br/><br/>Harry smelt of the sky above Hogwarts Pitch; it was captured floating in his very hair follicles, that scent of lake zephyrs and close-mown lawns, barely disguised beneath the smoky particles that lingered still, a week plus after the last battle and Draco’s amazing escape from certain death—escapes, rather.<br/><br/>It was amazing to feel this again, pressed so close to his thirsty person it was nearly bubbling beneath his skin. The pathetically inadequate word hammered into Draco’s head and there was no escaping it.<br/><br/>Oh, gods, Harry.<br/><br/>Draco clenched his eyes tighter yet, so much so they wrinkled and burnt from the pressure, and clamped his upper arms about Harry’s welcome form. His hands fluttered pointlessly above the arch of the other boy’s curved spine: his very fingers were unsure, uncertain as to whether they should dig in and grasp, not knowing if this small miracle would be taken away almost as soon as his needy skin had barely begun to appreciate it.<br/><br/>This was torment. Fucking torment. He wanted more of it.<br/><br/>For Harry Potter felt like all good things alive in this inexplicable five second lapse of post-war reality—all that had been so precious from Draco’s childhood, bound up in one compact, wiry person. The muscles that flexed beneath Draco’s fluttering fingers were caused by good old Quidditch and the act of dragging about lesson-heavy book bags. Harry’s arse and thighs were rendered fit and taut by endless hikes through familiar stone corridors and up and down moving staircases. Years of Hogwarts lectures resided in the fold of those too-short robes; ages and eons of shared mealtimes, Leaving Feasts and countless last-minute essays lay ghostly upon the skin he felt nudging against his collar: all that dull, dreary school routine drill Draco had known, expected, railed against to his fellows and taken so blithely for granted. Even unto the bloody robes Harry wore to stand before the ranks of the Wizengamot, the ones Harry apparently wore in lieu of court clothes and as carelessly as he ever wore anything, casually unbuttoned at the throat and a shade too large for him—they were regulation black wool weave and bluntly reassuring, with Potter’s Gryffindor insignia a starched blazon above his beating heart. They reminded Draco of his own schoolboy uniform, now burnt to charred cinders about the edges and smelling of blood, dirt and death, lying discarded on the floor of his armoire at home. Right next to his Pensieve full of temptation.<br/><br/>He’d never wear them again; there was no going back, was there?<br/><br/>But yet…this was Harry in his arms for this blink of time’s n’ere-closing eye and Draco’s hands, extended beyond that heaving back and supple spine, were at a complete loss as to what to do with such an anomaly. They flopped disconnected from his whirling brain, well apart from his stubborn chin that insisted on dropping down to rest light as a feather atop the deceptive silk that was Harry’s hair. From Draco’s flaring nostrils that insisted on inhaling every bit of Potter’s essence that Draco could drag into his starved lungs to his appallingly delighted toes, curling tight within their loafers, he could feel Harry, blowtorch bright against his exultant bones. From spout to handle, the vessel that was Draco was amazed—yes, amazed. Startled and grateful and appallingly blindsided—and by Harry, so nothing new there. No—nothing new there.<br/><br/>So familiar. And once, long ago, exceptionally dear to a much younger Draco Malfoy. He recalled that nebulous cloud of blissed-out emotion, as if from a very great distance. They’d talked and snogged and shagged, once. They’d freaking shared shite, like Hufflepuffs, and manage to walk away still intact, after, the better for it. Till it was ended, that was, and even then Potter had been dear enough to Draco to claw his heart till it bled freely and to shatter his every close-held belief. Precious enough to send Draco into violent fits: broken noses, bruised joints, sour words. But he’d more than paid for them—hadn’t he, then?—and really, at this moment in time, Draco was so very tired. This destructive flame called Harry was translated into comfort, purely, this impulsive embrace of Potter’s was benign.<br/><br/>Unasked for, unlooked for, but still…<br/><br/>Still.<br/><br/>Right, right—who was he fooling? Not Granger, nor Weasley, nor the watchful Aurors or even his own parents, right?<br/><br/>No, no. Draco must continue to think of him as Potter and not as Harry. That way lay ruin; he’d heard the rumours even whilst existing for a night-and-a-day as a minimum security short-term prisoner in Azkaban. Aurors and wardens gossiped like common magpies, just like every other plebe in the universe. Weasley’s little sister, wasn’t it? Not Granger at all.<br/><br/>Not Draco, certainly. Not now, nor for a long time, nor ever again, even if the moon stood still in its nightly arc and the world ceased its spinning.<br/><br/>Right, right. It was Potter that stirred restively within the vise of his arms, not Harry. Draco needed to always remember that bit. Nothing had changed and nothing would, not now.<br/><br/>He needed to end this, then. It was…no good could come of it.<br/><br/>Harry, the sly bastard, the prat, only snuggled harder against his chest, as if glued on.<br/><br/>When he blinked his strangely damp lashes at the bald truth of that sensible conclusion, pulling back just a smidgeon from Potter’s death grip upon his waist, Draco noticed again his mother and father, who’d edged away to allow them room at some point, and beyond them the forbidding forms of the two assigned Aurors, speaking quietly of procedure to Draco’s father. Yet Narcissa was beaming furtively at the two of then even as Lucius conferred with the one Auror who would be escorting them back to the Manor.<br/><br/>Granger and Weaselbee remained as Sphynxes, waiting for Potter to finish up his curious fit of forgiveness and come away from the perilous Malfoy family.<br/><br/>Perilous indeed. Toothless and defanged now, and thank Merlin for it. Draco had had enough drama to last a lifetime.<br/><br/>He was well aware Father would serve a greatly mitigated sentence, in part thanks to Potter’s testimony and in part due to the balanced and weighed-out recollections of others who’d witnessed Father’s final decisive actions on the field of battle—the Veritaserum produced Pensieve memories of warriors and victims of both Dark and Light. Lucius Malfoy had postured and waffled; he’d talked a good game and actually done very little, and Voldemort had broken his bloody wand like a bloody matchstick. Draco’s dad had been a poser, the git, up till nearly the end. But a few clear-headed souls recalled Malfoy Senior’s brilliant turnabout at the end, the telling actions of a proud man frantic to save his small family. Yes, he’d felled a few Death Eaters—Goyle and Crabbe and Nott, to be precise—and fortunately been knocked unconscious before the Dark Lord realized his betrayal and AK’d him for it.<br/><br/>Yes, Father would pay, but he wouldn’t die for it.<br/><br/>And Draco’s mother? Draco’s mother was a bloody national heroine suddenly, lauded by the Wizengamot and the papers both for saving Potter’s life by lying through her pearly teeth right at the very feet of the Dark Lord. This ironically not even an hour or so after Potter had risked his idiotic everything on a whim to rescue her only child from burning up in the aftermath of his own stupid hubris.<br/><br/>Still Harry clutched frantically at him and still Draco suffered it—gladly.<br/><br/>Draco was certain he should say something—some phrase both pungent and to the point and perhaps socially clever and pleasant as well. A word or two that would convey to Potter his vast, happy surprise at the way things had turned out.<br/><br/>And Draco was bowled over; that was certain. By the Harry in his arms; by his mother’s warm approving gaze and his father’s polite close-mouthed acceptance; by the telling, silent watch kept over them by Potter’s mates, standing guard. Why none of them weren’t stepping smartly forward to end this, Draco knew not. But he was damned glad they weren’t. It was the very last thing he’d ever expected, to experience the feeling of having Potter burrowed into his tight-clamping arms, a warm burden under fingers already curving to grasp and keep, but…it was the best thing that had happened in a very long time. He needed it so, to hold Harry.<br/><br/>But Harry shifted again, restive, and emitted some small sound—a ‘meep’ or something like. It panged Draco’s heart, that. Laid him bare to the lash. No; decidedly no—Pensieves weren’t all that effective, really.<br/><br/><em>I want</em>, some faint voice in his head whispered insistently, despite everything. It had long been silenced, what Draco wanted. He hated that it welled again with all the force of the fabled Krakatau.<br/><br/><em>I need.</em><br/><br/>"I," Draco stuttered, "I," and met the Weasel’s steady gaze. "I...don’t."<br/><br/>A look passed between them, the swell of pupils speaking volumes and covering years of knowing Harry, of knowing precisely how impulsive he actually was, how recklessly unguarded, despite the scheming. So, whatever else this embrace might be, it was at least sincere. And Weasel’s gaze was as good as written permission for Draco: ‘Go ahead,’ it said to him, ‘enjoy it. Who the hell knows what Harry’ll do next, yeah?’<br/><br/>"Draco," Potter whispered, as if he knew what brilliantly inane mental banters his old lover was engaged in, above the plane of his chin-ruffled locks. "Draco, thank Merlin."<br/><br/>"No!" Draco, jolted abruptly out of that weird sense of communion with Weaslebee, jumped a foot straight up, carrying Potter with him by dint of clamping down like a bleeding vise. His elbows cycled, his fingers independently made up their silly minds and clamped hard over Harry’s too-thin ribs at last. "No. Thank you, Har—"<br/><br/>He was rewarded with an upturned chin at long last and a stretched-out wicked grin, Cheshire as cheese and with Harry’s green eyes brilliant and glittering, and it codswalloped Draco completely. Bowled him over; left him breathless. He could so imagine snogging that look right off Harry’s pert face: eating it up, even.<br/><br/>Harry. Ah, Harry!<br/><br/>"But, yes."<br/><br/>Potter pulled back, ever so slowly, as if that walleyed gawp of Draco’s were the cue to end this and Draco lost his voice and his train of thought both, mid-babble.<br/><br/>"I have to…" Potter trailed off, seeming to come to himself as he glanced about him, like a man waking from a pleasant sleep. "You know."<br/><br/>He shrugged, disengaging his hands from Draco’s spine.<br/><br/>"…be off now."<br/><br/>A gap grew between them again, a wall of thin air that had been briefly surmounted. Draco was bereft all at once and understood none of it. How could it be that Harry Potter had become that precious to him; that necessary, and so quickly? He’d forgotten that bit, hadn’t he? Wiped it away and buried it forever?<br/><br/>"Right, mate," Weasley remarked, nodding obligingly. "Mum’s expecting us."<br/><br/>"Come away then, Harry," Granger added calmly and made as if to tug at Harry’s sleeve, though she didn’t.<br/><br/>How could it be? Draco asked himself pointlessly as Potter did finally withdraw, his long fingers crooked and clinging as they trailed down Draco’s robe’s sleeves. How might it not be?<br/><br/>He saw no end to it, what Harry had just stirred up within him. Truthfully. And what now? Détente? Cordial avoidance?<br/><br/>"But Draco, I’m so glad—so glad," Potter repeated and stepped back at the same time Granger and Weasley stepped forward. Draco was left standing, mouth open, staring at the Trio perplexed and at a dead loss as to what to do next. Should he respond—and how would he, even? What was there to say? Don’t go?<br/><br/>"I can’t tell you." Potter babbled on, repeating himself, the idiot. Draco listened very intently, so as to not miss any undercurrents. "I’m glad, though. Thankful. Please believe that."<br/><br/>His bollixed old schoolboy rival only blinked at him, pale slim fingers folding in upon themselves and forming loose fists, and entirely ineffective ones, too.<br/><br/>Draco gasped, with a start. Oh, yes! He’d been embraced by his enemy, just now—by his personal saviour. By a young man whose very scent imparted to him an overwhelming sense of internal wellbeing. He’d not felt that brilliant, that relaxed and stupidly hopeful in bloody ages. Not since before the events of the summer before Sixth Year, when all joy had ended—not in forever.<br/><br/>"Oi, but—" Draco really was loath to have it end, as strange and otherworldly as it had been. "Potter! You can’t just descend on a person and—then. I mean to say, Potter. Really."<br/><br/>"Draco," his mother intervened. "I’m sure Harry here has other obligations—as do we. The Aurors are awaiting us. Come, please."<br/><br/>"I’m sorry," Potter smiled sweetly at him and Draco’s foolish protests died away, unspoken. "I’m sorry to hold you up; I know you’re anxious to go home to the Manor, but I’m just so glad, Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy—Draco." He beamed foolishly at Narcissa and even at Draco’s father, who remained removed, no doubt settling the final details of his required probation and restitution; the next steps of moving on post-Dark Lord. No doubt as well there’d be paperwork and Goblin lawyers, Galleons shelled out in restitutions and repairs and yet more testimony—Draco shied away from the very notion of it all engulfing him even in his fragile new freedom, his gaze fixed on Potter to the exclusion of ought else. Potter was, after all, his one true polestar. If he’d a fix on Potter, he could find his own way, right?<br/><br/>Right.<br/><br/>"I only just—I had to let you all know," Potter was saying, with little birdlike nods and fluttering fingers. "I’m so very—glad. I am."<br/><br/>Over, ended, just like that.<br/><br/>Oh…oh, yes.<br/><br/>Granger, still with leveled eyebrows and that curiously stern blank gaze, bobbed her chin at them all most courteously, like a well-brought up girl. She followed closely on the heels of Potter when he finally wheeled away and was off down the corridor. Weasley lifted a broad shoulder in a last parting half-shrug at Draco, his blue eyed stare intent and assessing as it met Draco’s bewildered eyes—and yet, somehow, despite all, faintly sympathetic. As if to imply, ‘It’s Harry, mate, remember? What can you do, yeah?’<br/><br/>What can you do?<br/><br/>"I—thank you," Draco mouthed nearly inaudibly, watching them with the same exact feeling a stunned salmon surely experienced, when deposited hooked and left gasping for oxygen on sandy banks, dinner for the sporting gits. "Oi! Potter!" he called out croakily, but Potter didn’t turn back again, as he was already far too far along the dreary grey corridor and perhaps too preoccupied to hear any idiot calling out after him.<br/><br/>Thank you, Harry, Draco thought fervently, even so. Perhaps even with the intensity of prayer, as he followed that last glimpse of flapping black robes and fluttering midnight hair. Potter rounded the distant intersection corner, his mates at his heels, and was gone from sight—from sound—completely beyond Draco’s newborn interest in grasping hope incarnate. He’d just held Harry, right?<br/><br/>So, er. It could conceivably happen again, right?<br/><br/>Don’t go—oh, oh, bollocks! Draco thought. But…then. Doesn’t amount to much, does it, a spare thought to an old enemy? No more than any acknowledged hero would do, when confronted with a heap of not-so-innocent bystanders. Maybe not.<br/><br/>Likely not.<br/><br/>For that was all he’d ever been, correct? A bystander, whilst Harry played out his ordained role? Then why did it matter so much that he’d stopped, mid-stream, and come over to Draco?<br/><br/>What did it matter that Potter had embraced him, really? What good did that do him in the long run, when Draco was only eighteen and had his whole life ahead of him?<br/><br/>What had that arse Harry been thinking, to taunt him that way—to reach out and comfort him?<br/><br/>For if Draco had ever felt any real hope, it rested within the slight form of that confusing, impulsive person—this he did admit, reluctantly. It dwelt in the bones of an indomitable young man who never took ‘no’ for an answer. It nested in the mess of tumbled tendrils of silk floss atop his well-shaped skull and was as balm dripping heedlessly from those close-bitten cuticles and scarred fingertips. Draco had just had his first opportunity in ages to actually feel it soak into his weary bones—to feel Harry; his Harry, once—in ages.<br/><br/>It was a reawakening of all he’d believed firmly buried. All the ichor of nameless, formless yearning that permeated his person. It was First Year and Second, Third and Fourth all over again, only worse yet. Far more powerful; far more knowledgeable. The randy lightheadedness of Fifth Year revisited and amplified by the thousands.<br/><br/>The feelings he’d felt so long ago—it was another life, wasn’t it? Draco mused. Another world, and they’d been foolish and he’d been bloody arrogant. And then it had died, when Burbage did.<br/><br/>He’d believed it to be deceased, all of it—the wonder, the furtive excitement, the intensity—passed on to the hereafter even more decidedly than the spirit that had once inhabited the lifeless body of his Muggle Studies professor. He’d believed it brutally murdered in its very infancy, once the Dark Lord had taken him aside and plundered every small delusion he’d so doggedly retained, despite the childhood Pensieve protecting him like a Charm.<br/><br/>Oh, yes. He’d been so foolish, once. Naïve. The wavering hope that all would yet be well—that his all-powerful Father would fix it; that the Dark Lord would somehow relent; that Potter would somehow escape with his life if not his dignity and his cursed Gryffindor pride. Perhaps chastened, perhaps not the victor for once, but alive and breathing and still accessible for Draco to tease and to enjoy. He’d been so remarkably deluded—so very much the motley’d dunce.<br/><br/>Over and gone…but was it, really?<br/><br/>If Potter—if Harry—could hold Draco like that, in just that manner, even now: so desperately, so fiercely, in such a way that proclaimed louder than words that Draco was yet important to him? That he still mattered, putting aside all the harm he’d done, willingly and unwillingly, then could it really be…finished?<br/><br/>"Darling," his mother said firmly, interrupting his reverie. "We must go now. The Aurors are waiting. Come away, please."<br/><br/>"Now, son," his father added.<br/><br/>"Yes," Draco replied quickly, jolted back to reality, his attention drawn abruptly from the emptied corridor stretching long and bleak before him. What now? He asked himself. What now? "Yes, of course, coming. Pardon, Mother."<br/><br/>They turned in the direction of the Floo banks without further adieu, he and his small family, a unit battered and bruised but intact. Draco thought only of Harry, now once again Potter, and what might be done, and spared no heed to the mess that yet awaited them at home.<br/><br/>What he could possibly accomplish, now the fields were leveled and his sightlines free? This he needed to determine. For them both, but especially to appease that burning twisting ball of hunger flaring up in his middle.<br/><br/>It had never died, that. Pensieve waters, however cool and soulless, had no effect upon what was bone-bred hot and as anciently brilliant as Draco’s own birthright. And at home, like a sole dark lantern in a colourless brave new world, his godfather awaited news of the Trials. Severus Snape, painted in oils, a portrait as wise and all-knowing as the man himself had ever been. As irate, too, but perhaps…just perhaps, he could also provide counsel.<br/><br/>Draco would be certain to consult him. He’d a future to worry over now. Had to approach it properly, right?<br/><br/>…Right-oh.<br/><br/><br/><b><span class="u">Truffles</span></b><br/><br/><br/>"Harry, listen," Ginny tugged his sleeve. "Harry!"<br/><br/>"Er—what, Gin?" Malfoy was just across the way, behind the plate glass window of the Quidditch supply store. Harry peered attentively, nearly going cross-eyed in the effort, trying to make out if that was a display of snitches the git was examining so closely or if he’d his eye on the star of the newest broom shipment from France, Le Stratospheros. "Hmm?"<br/><br/>"Mum’s of the opinion we should get ourselves hitched, Harry," Ginny said, shrugging. "But I don’t think it’s a particularly sound idea, do you? Not groovy."<br/><br/>"Er, eh? She is?" That had his head slewing ‘round and all thoughts of what mischief Malfoy might be managing in the Quidditch shop receding. "Merlin—really?"<br/><br/>"Yes, really, Harry," Ginny tossed her head. This had less effect than usual as her ginger waves were neatly braided and bound up in a crown about her lovely head. She wrinkled her small, pert nose for good measure, perhaps realizing some further emphasis was necessary. "You know Mum, Harry—always the two-by-two for her. She wants everything and everyone sorted out and tidied and I’m precisely the same age as she was when she married Dad. I’ve rather expected it; haven’t you?"<br/><br/>"Um," Harry cocked his head and had a soothing slurp of malted chocolate. "Er, no, not really. Why would I, Ginny? We’re barely of age."<br/><br/>"Not in the Wizarding world, Harry," Ginny shook her braided crown, disturbing a few brave stray curls and arraying them in a rather fetching manner across her creamy brow. "We tend to marry young—there’s so few of us, you see? Less, now."<br/><br/>Harry scowled at his paper straw and took to fiddling with it, picking the kinks out of the bendy bit and stretching them beyond all recognition. "Yeah. I know. Kindly don’t remind me; there’s a good girl."<br/><br/>Ginny flipped him the bird with pleasant cheer.<br/><br/>"So," she said lightly, "You know, right? We should?"<br/><br/>"We should what?" Harry asked, puzzled.<br/><br/>"Sooo," she drew the single syllable out the longest possible amount and sent him a very speaking look, as if Harry should know all that it implied. He didn’t; not at all, and sent her a searching glance to say so. She shrugged at him, flapping a hand. "You don’t, do you? Know?"<br/><br/>Harry shook his head, mangling his straw to unrecognizability. As he didn’t, at all.<br/><br/>Ginny huffed at him.<br/><br/>"Oh, alright, Harry. Let me explain it to you, then, as you seem particularly distractible today. Not that you aren’t always, these days."<br/><br/>"Super," Harry drawled, despite the high spots of red that graced his cheekbones. If he was distractible, it was Malfoy’s fault. Not that he was admitting anything of the sort. And best not to mention that to Ginny, either. Who knew what she’d make of it? "Do."<br/><br/>"Right. Well. Mum’s weird now Fred’s gone and Ron and Hermione have her all tipsy-turvey, what with running off to Australia to get married without her. And Fleur’s up the bum—did you know? Bill just let us know this morning, in the Floo."<br/><br/>"Er, no, no," Harry mumbled, flushing. He glanced away, embarrassed. Why would he ever know that? It wasn’t as if he and Bill were great confidants, nor was it as if he cared who got what up what bum, was it? What was Ginny thinking, that he should? "Great—great. That’s brilliant...I guess. Bully for them, right?"<br/><br/>"Right," Ginny echoed firmly. "Absolutely. And for Mum, which is brilliant. Except for the fact they can’t even think about that month long trip to visit with Fleur’s Bohemian relatives they’ve planning. Veela can’t travel far when they’re preggers. Which means they stay at Shell Cottage even though Mum wants them both to come to the Burrow for the duration. You follow? That’s not so good. Two-by-two, Harry."<br/><br/>"Ah," Harry nodded gravely over this very important—and useless to him—piece of bonus trivia. "’Kay, yeah, go on then. About your mum and the two-by-two idea, Gin. She’s not happy, right?"<br/><br/>"Right. So, the thing is, Mum’s got it stuck firmly in her head that we’re next up, Harry, because Ron and Hermione clearly aren’t and she can’t fuss over Fleur as she wants to. And, well—I don’t think so, not at all. We spent far too long a time apart last year, Harry. The year before that, as well. I mean to say, I simply can’t see it, can you? Working out, that is. Oh, no. Not happening, despite what Mum wants."<br/><br/>"Mmm, no," Harry allowed agreeably, even if a tiny part of him was greatly startled. He’d no clue he’d been written off already. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing, either. "I mean, I love you an awful lot, Gin, I do, but—"<br/><br/>"Exactly! I’d murder you in three days flat, Harry, and you’d strangle me in less than two, right?"<br/><br/>"Right. So, that all being laid out on the table," Harry stared at her inquisitively, "what’s the actual problem, then? Tell your Mum no how, no way, Gin, and let that be the end of it. She’ll understand."<br/><br/>"Well…no, she won’t. And that’s the problem." It was abruptly Ginny’s turn to stare off into the middle distance, avoiding Harry’s gaze—until her attention was caught by Malfoy’s unmistakable white-blond pelt. "Oh, look, Harry! There’s Draco Malfoy, over in the shop across the way! Wonder what he’s up to, the git? Shopping?"<br/><br/>"Um. Likely so, Gin," Harry shrugged, impatient. The matter of Malfoy could keep for a bit; he’d a plan for Malfoy, for later. Thanks to bloody Snape, really. But Mum Weasley wasn’t a kettle even Harry could safely leave unattended. "That’s what you do in Diagon, isn’t it? Shop? Probably buying himself a new broom or something. Expensive, I’m sure."<br/><br/>"Shut up, prat. I didn’t mean that literally, you know," his declared non-girlfriend scoffed at him. "About him shopping. Clearly he’s shopping—he’s holding a parcel, Harry, and he’s at the register."<br/><br/>"Okay," Harry nodded. "Alright."<br/><br/>Ginny went on, nagging away as she did sometimes. Harry quite thought she’d learnt it from her mother.<br/><br/>"I really don’t know why you always have to be so…so damned stuck on facts, Harry," she carped. "No bloody imagination, have you? That’s another reason it would never work between us. You’re…well, Harry, I hate to say it, but you’re a bit dull. Very in the box, Harry."<br/><br/>"Er—blame Hermione, Gin," Harry winced. "It’s all her influence on me, that—and NEWTS, too, likely. I used to be much more inventive once…but…Gin, the point is?" Harry prompted irritably, waving away thoughts of Malfoy. "About your Mum? Go on. Tell me what you think we should do. I don’t want to upset her."<br/><br/>"Clearly neither do I, Harry. She loves you like a son, you know."<br/><br/>Harry flushed happily and Ginny blushed demurely and she happened to be particularly lovely when she did such girly things; Harry spared a scant two seconds regret to the fact that it had not—apparently—worked out with her. Which was all for the best really, as he had plans.<br/><br/>Which could be addressed later. "Your Mum, Gin?" Harry prodded.<br/><br/>"Hmm, well, the thing is…Mum wants the little ones, Harry—you know, grandchildren? Heaps and heaps of them, and soonest. And, well, I think it would settle her, rather. She’s not the same, now that Fred is gone."<br/><br/>"No…no, she isn’t. You’re right, Gin." Harry nodded. "None of us are, actually. But, well. Well, okay. What were you thinking, other than that? As in, what’s that got to do with us? We’re over, right? End of story."<br/><br/>"I’m thinking we could make her happy, Harry, one way if not the other. Between us two, we could do it."<br/><br/>This time the blush on Ginny’s fair, faintly freckled face rivaled the scarlet stripes in the awnings that shaded Fortesque’s magically enlarged dining porch.<br/><br/>"Ngh? Urk?"<br/><br/>Harry choked on his own spit, spat out his nibbled straw and knocked his malt glass straight over, all in an instant. A pool of melted chocolate ice covered the round table and instantly began dripping directly onto both their serviette draped laps. His cock, which had perked up nicely at the view of Malfoy—still nosing ‘round the new French brooms, that lucky bastard—wilted immediately under the arctically cold flow of soupy ice cream.<br/><br/>"Harry! Harry, really!" Gunny exclaimed, jumping up. "My goodness, Harry—whatever were you thinking? Get a fecking grip, will you?" A wave of her wand had the mess clean but Harry stayed stock still in his tiny café chair, mouth open wide. "Prat! Worse than Ron, you are!"<br/><br/>"Er? Ah? Wh-what? What did you say, Gin?"<br/><br/>"Idiot!" She plopped herself back into her seat and sent her wand tip flicking a zigzag path down the front of him. "You’re all sticky now, Harry—and so am I, still! Have a care next time, alright? There—I’ve got it."<br/><br/>"Ne-ne-next time?" Harry stuttered, brain permanently disabled by that request. "You—you mean you’re—pardon, but what the bleeding hell, Ginny?"<br/><br/>She huffed at him, clearly impatient.<br/><br/>"Honestly, Harry! I happen to be a Witch, you know?"<br/><br/>"Uh-huh…" Harry nodded slowly. That he did indeed comprehend; indeed, had some working knowledge of, thanks ever so. "And?"<br/><br/>"You’re a Wizard, Harry. Witches and Wizards can produce these marvellous persons known familiarly to some as grandchildren, Harry. Now, I don’t know precisely how your Muggles go about it, but we Wizarding folk, Har—"<br/><br/>"Hold up!" Harry flung a flattened palm up to stem her words, as they’d veered from the straight-line Express to reality and were tearing off well into LaLa Land. "Pardon?"<br/><br/>"Harry, read my lips, alright?" Ginny leant across the microscopic table between them, a frown leveling her reddish eyebrows. "You. Me." She flipped a hand between the two of them, noses almost bumping. "Male, female. Right? Follow?"<br/><br/>"Er…okay," Harry, who’d half risen in terror, relaxed slowly and placed his hands firmly on his magically refilled malted glass, in case the next set of obvious postulates his ex-girlfriend laid out startled him into another fit. "With you so far, yes. And we just agreed we weren’t, right? That it didn’t—wasn’t? Weren’t, I mean. Going to shag?"<br/><br/>Ginny shook her head slowly, as one would with an infant or small child, upon which one was attempting to impress a concept terribly crucial. She sighed, a little gust of vanilla breath wafting into Harry’s panic-flared nostrils.<br/><br/>"Well, no, Harry, not normally. We most definitely aren’t. But this is a special case, you see. It’s Mum involved. That changes things. Lots. Completely, even. So…"<br/><br/>"So?"<br/><br/>"It follows. We do the bomb after we perform a few fertility Charms and Bob’s your uncle, Mum has another grandchild to fuss over. At the Burrow. Where she can get at him—or her. And there you go, right? Problem solved."<br/><br/>"Gah. No." Harry blinked rapidly. "Er, no—NO! I don’t go, Gin!"<br/><br/>"Oh, Harry," Ginny jabbed his forearm with a sharp fingernail. "Weren’t you the one who always wanted a family? The same Harry Potter who blabbered on about wanting to have at least three little kiddies of his very own, if not six? And who’s going to carry on the Potter line if you don’t, eh? Don’t you want to be a parent, Harry? You always did, before."<br/><br/>"Um. Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with it, Gin," Harry pointed out most reasonably, his fingers nearly cracking the malted glass. "I mean, I don’t want to have one now, for Merlin’s sake. It’s too damned soon! I’m nineteen, for chrissake!"<br/><br/>Ginny shook her head again, regarding him with a definite air of pity.<br/><br/>"No; no, it isn’t. That’s the whole point, Harry. In a nutshell. We Wizarding folk marry young. Quite young. If you wait too long, git, there’ll be no left who’s willing. All the good ‘uns will be snapped up right off the starting post. Even me. Mum’ll insist, even if I don’t want to."<br/><br/>"Erp!"<br/><br/>Harry gawped at her. He moved his jaw about in several different ways, attempting to force some of the sheer befuddlement he was feeling across his lips and into the shrunken space between them.<br/><br/>"Nrrgh!" he managed, finally. "Nurrrr!"<br/><br/>Fortunately Ginny knew him very well and could translate his slightly less than articulate moments with ease.<br/><br/>"I mean it, Harry. Malfoy over there—see him?"<br/><br/>Harry nodded, stunned, lips still a’twitch. Yes, of course he saw Malfoy—he always saw Malfoy, waking and sleeping. That was a large part of his distraction, wasn’t it?<br/><br/>"He’s planning on hitching himself to Astoria Greengrass, likely in the autumn. A heir and spare and then they’re all done with it, Harry. They’ll be able to move on with their own lives, knowing they’ve done their duty to procreate. Pressure will be off them, then."<br/><br/>"Ah." Harry blinked; this was news to him. Not very nice news, either. He’d rather had plans for Malfoy, the pernicious bastard. "Ah?"<br/><br/>Ginny nodded sharply. "Yep. All settled. And George and Angelina are also planning to tie the knot in a few months, Harry. Mum’s over the moon about it. There there’s Ron and Hermione, but that’s practically a given—they were always going to. Just wish they’d waited, but, well. What does one do, yeah? Too late for Mum now. Pity, that."<br/><br/>"But! But! I don’t want to get married, Gin!" Harry wailed, mainly because he really, really didn’t—or if he did, it wasn’t to his very much beloved but not at all suitable ex-girlfriend. "I—you—NO! NOT!"<br/><br/>"Merlin! You really don’t know, do you, Harry? What you’re saying no to?"<br/><br/>"Know what? Harry demanded. "What don’t I know, Ginny Weasley? Tell me this instant!"<br/><br/>"How people go about things, Harry. Not every Witch or Wizard wants to marry, either. But they do need to be parents. There’s ways and means, prat. There’s an understanding."<br/><br/>"There is?"<br/><br/>"Oh, yes." Ginny regarded him with half-lidded eyes, assuming a Buddha-like air of calm competency. "It’s called an arrangement, Harry. It’s very simple. The Witch or Wizard arranges a term contract with someone in the same situation. Sometimes it’s for Galleons and sometimes there’s barter involved—maybe British citizenship or simply to provide legitimate heirs for both Houses involved—you know how important names are, right? But it’s only a business contract in the end, essentially. Everyone gets something good out of it. We do it all the time, Harry. People hardly ever manage lasting relationships straight out of Hogwarts or Beauxbatons, Harry—no matter what Mum and Dad will tell you. They’re bloody anomalies, them. I certainly don’t expect to find someone who’ll love me as much as Dad does Mum—or vice versa. It’s unreasonable."<br/><br/>"Oh." Harry nodded slowly. "Oh, alright. Unreasonable, yeah?"<br/><br/>"Right. And generally, yes, it is. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t happen, Harry. And for you I really hope it does, one day. You deserve it, Harry, of all the people I know—but it won’t be me, of course, ‘as we’re not like that." She nodded to herself, decisively, her eyes on Malfoy’s arse. "Nope."<br/><br/>"No…" Harry agreed, his voice a bit feeble. "Er…no."<br/><br/>"’Kay, then. Now that we’ve that all sorted, what do you say, Harry? Shall we get down to business, since we’re here? I think a ring first, for Mum’s sake. She likes them."<br/><br/>"Er…sure. I guess. If you say so, Gin."<br/><br/>"Excellent!" Ginny beamed at him. "Mum’ll be so pleased, Harry. Can’t even begin to tell you how much so! Really, really over the moon, I think. Good man!"<br/><br/>"…Super." Harry blanched, and kept his gaze on Malfoy, who was finally exiting the Quidditch shop and wandering off down Diagon in the direction of WWW. "Brill, Gin….gah."<br/><br/>"Oh, and don’t worry, Harry—I’ll give it back to you when we’re through. M’not that hard up, you know?"<br/><br/>"Of course not."<br/><br/><br/><br/><b><span class="u">Oxygen</span></b><br/><br/><br/>"What the?"<br/><br/>Harry, clutching his broom, two Shrunken packets and an armload of willow kindling, stopped and stared. "What in bloody hell are you doing here, Malfoy?"<br/><br/>Malfoy, who was just finishing up the finer adjustments of balancing a quarter-sized Potions cauldron over a merry little Beltane fire, raised his chin with a decided sniff.<br/><br/>"Same as you, I imagine. Why? You have some sort of issue with my presence, Potter?"<br/><br/>Harry dropped his broom and packets and his kindling into a heap on the grassy ground with a start. The light of realization visibly dawned across his face. He opened his mouth once or twice, saying nothing and making like a goldfish, and finally scrabbled about under his robes for a small silver object—a tarnished locket—which he held up triumphantly.<br/><br/>"You’ve been talking to Snape, haven’t you?"<br/><br/>Harry flipped his portable Potions Professor’s portrait open, to reveal the perpetual scowl of his most persistent detractor and most unlikely confidant, one Severus Snape, deceased.<br/><br/>"But of course he has, Potter," Snape, not missing a beat, announced, his voice the same old rich drawl that had always been used to set Harry’s teeth on edge. The fact that it didn’t now was a triumph of hard won maturity over gut emotion. "My godson and I converse often and regularly…and on a wide range of topics, may I add? He, at least, has the benefit of some classical education, Potter, unlike you, troglodyte. What of it?"<br/><br/>"Git!" Harry growled at them both equally. "Shut up, Severus—not now! And really, Malfoy!" He focused on his unwanted Auror partner, the thorn-in-his-side, irksome, nasty bit of business Kingsley had stuck him with just six months ago. "What are you doing here? Tell me!" he demanded. "You’ve no right!"<br/><br/>"Of course I have the right, Harry—same as you. I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, twat."<br/><br/>Malfoy rocked back on his lean haunches and brushed a casual hand through the blond hair Harry spent far too much time furtively wishing to touch. He peered up at Harry inquisitively and only a fellow Auror could detect the faint air of anxiety his familiar return scowl disguised.<br/><br/>"Do not!" Harry insisted vehemently. He glared for all he was worth. "Go away, Malfoy!"<br/><br/>"My gods, Potter, you are thick, aren’t you?" his Auror partner taunted. "Thick as a bloody Quidditch bat." A hand was waved at the tiny fire blazing away before him with enthusiasm. "Can you not see the fire? It is May Day, Potter, which should provide you with at least some sort of basic clue as to what I am doing here, not that it’s any of your business, partner."<br/><br/>"Hah!" Harry huffed, still furious. "You bastard! You’re planning something, aren’t you?"<br/><br/>"Clearly I am in process of enjoying my own personal celebration of the holiday, Potter, here on the grounds of Hogwarts, the most magical of locales and thus the most suitable. And you dare call yourself an Auror!" Malfoy sniffed again, insulted—but Harry wasn’t buying that load of tripe for an instant. "You are an ass, aren’t you? I know I’ve always thought so. Aurors aside, partner."<br/><br/>"Bosh!" Harry exclaimed. He instantly crouched down beside his unwanted and quite unexpected work partner and stuck a curious hand into the midst of the neat rows of vials Malfoy had laid out, knocking at least one full row of them out of their neat alpha order. "That’s utter rubbish, Malfoy! What are these all, then? Practicing a bit of Dark Magic, Malfoy? Because this one sure looks like blood to me!"<br/><br/>He held up one crystal vial dramatically, waving it. Red liquid sloshed within. Malfoy snatched it away instantly. It had a tiny label gummed on the one side and Harry caught a glimpse of it: <em>Pomegranate Juice, Fresh Squeezed.</em> He blushed furiously, snarling with inchoate emotion, but the git only tittered at him, smirking.<br/><br/>"Ho, ho!" Malfoy reared back on his heels, reverting to an irritated glare. "Why is that always the first thing out of your mouth when you see me, Potter—accusation? What are you so very suspicious of when it comes to me? I’m a bloody Auror as much as you are, cretin. Further , I am your most trusted partner, git! Why the fuck would I be playing about with the Dark Arts on Beltane? Beltane is the second holiest day of the Wizarding year, Harry! That’s a criminal offence if it’s detected, the use of the Dark Arts this day—you know that! I never!"<br/><br/>"Hmmm." Harry shrugged, disbelief written in every line of his wiry body, and hastily lifted up a vial marked Thyme in a script both fussy and terribly tidy. "Really? You say so, do you? What’s this, then, Malfoy? Because it looks to me as though you’ve the ingredients for a Potion here, git, and not just any Potion, either! My Potion, arsehole!"<br/><br/>"Hardly yours, Potter," Snape remarked mildly. "As I’m the actual inventor in question. You and your Granger have only modified it slightly, same as Mr. Malfoy has, on my advice. But do go on with your tantrum, boy. Don’t let me stop you. It is amusing to watch, at least."<br/><br/>"Shut up, Snape!" Harry was livid. "No one asked you!"<br/><br/>"Of course not, Potter—they never do, more’s the pity."<br/><br/>"And what of it, Potter?" Malfoy growled back, brows lowered in an equally nasty scowl. "Is there some sane, valid, pressing reason why I cannot stir up a particular Potion on Beltane? Is it illegal, partner? Because I don’t think so, you great prat—not at all! You’ve nothing on me—and no good reason to come along and accuse me of anything foul! Git."<br/><br/>"Argh!" Harry, weary of bending his knees so uncomfortably, fell into an Indian-style cross-legged slouch directly across from his ancient arch-nemesis. "Of course there isn’t anything illegal about making up a Potion on Beltane, you twat—but why are you? And why here, in the Forest? Don’t you have that whole huge lot of Manor grounds to build your damned Beltane fire? And—and what is this, exactly? Tell me that, do! Is it—is it Snape’s?"<br/><br/>"Oh, yes, Harry. It’s of Severus’s invention. Has he not just said so?"<br/><br/>"I! I hate you, Malfoy!" Harry couldn’t prevent his wrath from spilling over. "You—you’re infuriating! And—and you’re probably up to no good!"<br/><br/>Malfoy smiled at him. It was a wicked little grin and very mocking. He lifted a slim shoulder in an easy motion and Harry forced his recalcitrant gaze to stay firmly fixed on Malfoy’s mocking face. The git—the sexy git—was entirely too attractive. Harry had rued Kingsley’s inexplicable partnering of the two of them every single day for the last six months because of it.<br/><br/>Bastard!<br/><br/>"Tell me what you’re doing here, Malfoy," Harry demanded again. "And don’t lie to me! I know you’re up to something nefarious, arse—you always have some ulterior motive!"<br/><br/>"Indeed I do, peckerhead, but clearly ‘nefarious’ is not what’s needed at the moment. It’s very simple, Auror Potter. My home does not possess the famed Hogwarts Whomping Willow, Potter, for the one thing—an ingredient I require—and for the other, it is not situated properly for the incantation I plan to use with this Potion. Ipso facto, I am here, before you. Legally allowed, might I add? McGonagall has provided me written permission. I took the precaution of obtaining it…which you likely have not, knowing you."<br/><br/>"Very good, Mr. Malfoy," Snape, apparently tired of being silent, butted in, praising his little pet as usual. "Geomagical locatory points are vastly important to this current endeavour. Hogwarts is exactly where I was most successful in brewing this particular Potion. I’m glad you’ve noted that. And a fine example of forward planning, to consult with the current Headmistress, boy. I commend you. Potter, do take note. This is how one goes about it."<br/><br/>"Oh, shut up, Severus!" Harry ordered. "And stop making so much of him! We all know who it is you favour, you prick! The point is—the point is—"<br/><br/>"The point is, Harry," Malfoy’s wicked smile faded. He turned a serious git in the blink of an eye, and Harry, caught up by the glitter of silver in his fine grey eyes, goggled. It was late afternoon on Beltane Day, and the sun’s rays were bloodying the sky above them. Shadows crept from the Forest insidiously. No one man should look quite so handsome, framed in the rays of the twilight sun of Scotland’s longest day of the year—no one! "The point is, I’m here for the same reason you are and now you know it. Not that you shouldn’t be fully aware, even before you ventured here. I imagine Severus has kept you abreast of what I am attempting? I’d have thought you’ve come to lend me your assistance instead of ripping me a new one. But I suppose I should’ve known better. We’ve never exactly rubbed along well together, have we?"<br/><br/>Malfoy—the prat—looked just as good serious as he did smirking. And he was correct, as well, which was frustrating to no end. Harry had merely hoped to forestall him, and steal the march by planting himself firmly in the midst of the most fortuitious of locations: Hogwarts School, on the very edge of the Forbidden Forest, directly above the magical longitude he and Hermione had located.<br/><br/>And no, they didn’t get along, but it was more because Harry wanted to shag the daylights out of the git than any leftover childish hatred.<br/><br/>"Oh—bah!" Harry, the righteous wind snatched from his sails, allowed his shoulders to slump. He turned his locket round so he could glare at the portrait contained within; a light breeze rose up and ruffled the two contrasting locks of hair carefully tucked away in the opposing frame, the stretching sun’s rays calling a brilliant ginger gleam from one of them. "Yes, yes, he has, the git," Harry admitted finally and quite reluctantly. "He’s told me. Though I didn’t think you’d come here, Malfoy. That’s beyond enough, that. You’re horning in on my idea, being here."<br/><br/>"No, I’m not, Harry," Malfoy chided. "This is not just your idea, as you so quaintly put it. As you no doubt know, Hogwarts is virtually a requirement, given the specifics of the Beltane fire itself. The Willow—the rushes from the Lake, the clay: all very specific ingredients and not to be substituted. And you could as easily say you’re the interloper, Harry. No one gave you monopoly on Severus’s handiwork; anyone can attempt this Potion, idiot. We just happen to be the two people actively at it this particular year."<br/><br/>"No, Mr. Malfoy—not anyone," Snape interrupted. "Hardly ‘anyone’ at all, actually. My notebooks were very specifically willed and for good reason, Mr. Malfoy. There are very few people in this world who have access to them and that’s all to the better and exactly as I wished it. The Potion to which you refer is extremely difficult to construct and not at all reliable in result—as we have discussed, repeatedly, you and I. It is dangerous as well—one misstep and you may find yourself in a place far more forbidding than this particular old growth Forest!"<br/><br/>"Now, Severus," Malfoy intervened, but the painted Professor wasn’t finished. "I hardly think I’m likely to bollix it—"<br/><br/>"I myself have only produced an efficacious result once and I still know not what factor exactly caused it." Severus Snape added, a triumphant sneer on his saturnine features, "And I highly doubt that either of you can manage it on your own, fools. A partner is called for, if only to keep up with the continual stirring."<br/><br/>"That’s beside the point, Severus," Harry exclaimed. "And between us, I think Hermione and I have it sorted. I’ve a Charm for the stirring, Snape—as we discussed, remember?" He glared stonily at Snape’s small painted face and then turned his snapping eyes to Malfoy, who sat watching, irritating amusement apparent in the cock of those annoying blond eyebrows. "Which is more than you do, Malfoy, I daresay, so you should just take yourself off now—leave it to the experts. I have this handled, thanks ever so."<br/><br/>"It strikes me, now that I think further upon it," Snape’s fruity voice was not to be stilled, "that a partner would be the most obvious of solutions, especially for this. It is highly likely you’ll do each other—not to mention the world at large—a fair bit of damage if you proceed singly—"<br/><br/>"Shut up, Snape!" Harry yelped. "You know exactly why I wanted to do this by myself! You even agreed my reasoning was sound, arsehole! Don’t encourage this git to stay here! Send him off!"<br/><br/>"Now, Harry, I think you’re overreacting," Malfoy chimed in, still sporting that devilish grin. "If the good Professor—the one who actually came up with this particular recipe, may I add? If he counsels using a partner, then that’s how it should be. And, what d’you know? Here I am, aren’t I? And already quite familiar with your sloppy working style, Harry. Why, it couldn’t be more perfect—the two of us, working together."<br/><br/>"Hah!" Harry snorted. "You say so, Malfoy!"<br/><br/>"I do, indeed. I think it’s a marvellous solution, Harry."<br/><br/>"Stop addressing me as Harry, Malfoy! I never gave you leave to do that!" Harry grumbled. "If anything, it’s the opposite. This isn’t a joke, Malfoy. It needs to be strictly contained, should anything go wrong. The fewer involved, the better."<br/><br/>Malfoy grabbed Harry’s sleeve without so much as a by-your-leave, sir. "Wrong again, Harry. It requires two Wizards, this. It is practically meant to be used only by two Wizards with the exact same goal in mind—and we fit the bill, Harry, precisely. This is a fortunate happenstance, Harry—go with it and cease your pointless fussing. You know I’m right, if you think about it."<br/><br/>"You’re not!" Harry’s fury bubbled, but there was the sneaking suspicion he’d been set up, as well, lurking at the rear of his brain. And perhaps not only by that git Snape, but also by Hermione, who worried on his behalf. "We’re not! I’m only trying to change one small thing, Malfoy—just one! Who knows what chicanery you’ve planned, git? Bringing Voldemort back might be the least of it!"<br/><br/>"Prick!" Malfoy exclaimed. He pressed a slim white hand against his chest. "You wound me, Harry. That’s the last thing I’d ever want—don’t even joke about it."<br/><br/>Harry had the grace to look shamefaced at him. "Oh, alright," he sighed. "I’m sorry, for what it’s worth. I take it back—but that still doesn’t mean we should work together on this, Malfoy. Something could go very wrong—"<br/><br/>‘I do beg your pardon!" Snape interjected. "That is my work you’re impugning, Potter!"<br/><br/>"And if it does, it shouldn’t happen to both of us. Your son needs you, Malfoy."<br/><br/>Malfoy smiled, and it was most definitely nothing more than a grimace. "And yours do not? Hardly, Harry."<br/><br/>"Malfoy—"<br/><br/>"But I’m not leaving, Harry. Not a chance. I’ve worked too hard for this moment—and it’s only once a year I have the opportunity. Not going anywhere, I’m afraid, no matter what you say. Get used to it."<br/><br/>"Piss off, Malfoy."<br/><br/>"You, Potter."<br/><br/>"You first, git. I was here before you were."<br/><br/>"Were not."<br/><br/>Harry leaned forward, looking over his heap of needed things. Snape smirked at the both from his locket.<br/><br/>"Here it comes," he muttered prophetically.<br/><br/>"I hate you, Malfoy, you know that?" Harry growled, face reddening.<br/><br/>"Sure you do, Potter. That’s why you fucking shagged me every chance you got." Draco was unimpressed.<br/><br/>"I never—I would never—I didn’t!"<br/><br/>"You did, too. I…I remember it—clearly."<br/><br/>"You don’t," Harry insisted, pushing his face right up against his long time enemy’s. "You’re lying, prick. Lying, lying, lying!"<br/><br/>Oh, really?" Draco drawled. "Well, we’ll see about that, Potter."<br/><br/>"Yeah?"<br/><br/>"Yes." It was a bloody disaster, that first kiss. It actually hurt and Harry nearly had his lip split.<br/><br/>"That—that proves nothing, Malfoy!" he exclaimed, panting. "Nothing!"<br/><br/>"Then," Draco muttered, closing the tiny gap and knocking precious ingredients and flotsam this way and that. "Then maybe this will—Harry. My Harry."<br/><br/>With groan Harry fell against him; the first might’ve been awful but the second lit his fuse. Draco gathered him up with an answering moan and they slumped together, narrowly avoiding the Beltane blaze.<br/><br/>"Right," Snape’s portrait remarked to no one. "I’m off then. There are other, calmer frames I can dwell in, you know."<br/><br/>"Mmm," Harry paid no heed to that, not the locket slowly closing of its own volition upon his heaving chest. "Gods, Malfoy—Draco! What took you so fucking long?"<br/><br/>"Ngh," Draco rolled him over, well away from the fire, and proceeded to nibble his way down Harry’s shirtfront, popping buttons with his teeth as he went. "Harry—Harry?"<br/><br/>"I warn you, I am leaving," Snape was present and accounted for, the interfering git. "If you run into trouble, you two, I shan’t be available to provide any sort of assistance—so don’t bother knocking me up, either. I’ll be at Granger’s where it's at least quiet."<br/><br/>"Can’t you shut him up?" Draco growled, his hands tugging away at Harry’s denims. "Gods, but he’s annoying!"<br/><br/>"Mmm—nrgh!" Harry gulped, struggling upright to help with the general move toward nakedness. "Yeah, yeah," he gasped. "Right, got it," he informed his old Professor. "Don’t call you—and you won’t call us. Brill, yeah. So, er, see ya, Snape—we’ll take it from here, I think. Thanks!"<br/><br/>"Potter! Oi, Potter!" The last of Snape heard from that evening was a guttural roar. "If you muck up that Potion, don’t come crying to me!"<br/><br/>"Please, Harry," Draco’s urgent request was far more interesting to heed. "Knees, now. Let me at you."<br/><br/>Harry scrambled to obey, sluggish under an abruptly crashing wave of déjà vu. It came from nowhere—from everywhere, all at once, like a hurricane through the Forest of his mind.<br/><br/>"Oh..I…er, Draco?" he stuttered, halting. "Draco, did we…really? Be-before, I mean?"<br/><br/>"Harry? Alright there, Harry?" Draco didn’t hear the question, clearly, only yanked Harry up and back, fingers already slipping into position, the other hand clamped in a bruising grip across Harry’s one hip. Harry winced at the familiar burn he’d never before felt. "Harry, it’s been so long," Draco Malfoy was gabbling. "Harry, I’ve missed you—I’ve wanted you. You want me too, right? Say you do, Harry—say it!"<br/><br/>"Yes!" Harry yelped, when one finger went particularly deep. "Oh, yessss," he moaned, when it twisted.<br/><br/>"Harry…Harry," Draco chanted. "Harry!"<br/><br/>"Ungh!" Harry grunted, blinking away tears. One finger knuckling became three and then there was a man’s bold cock butting at his arse. His apparently not-virgin arse. "Ca-careful, git!"<br/><br/>"Sorry—sorry!" Draco grabbed Harry’s cock in a grip too tight to be anything but awfully uncomfortable—and brilliant, all the same. "<em>Sorry</em>—I just. Let me?"<br/><br/>"Yeah, oh yeah," Harry moaned. "Yessss! Fucking do that, you bastard! Just do it, please!"<br/><br/>"We did, yeah," he muttered a second after, mainly to himself, dropping his chin to his folded arms and jerking fitfully under Draco’s hurried yet careful prodding. "Gods, yes—we sodding well <em>did</em>."<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Hedgehog Quill, Powdered</b></span><br/><br/>Harry hadn’t believed it—<em>couldn’t</em> believe it. Would never, no matter what was done or asked of him, believe it. And yet it was so.<br/><br/>Draco returned cold and contained, yet burning with an impatient fury there was no battering through. And Harry was champion at persistence.<br/><br/>His nose broken, angry as hellfire and alight with a crusading spirit, he set out to track the bastard arse down. Discover what was so all fire important that Draco would leave him high and dry—fucking dump him—for the likes of a slit-nosed evil sod such as Voldemort.<br/><br/>Harry’s heart roared.<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Oak</b></span><br/><br/>"I’m horribly cold, Harry. Build it higher."<br/><br/>"I can’t. Someone will see."<br/><br/>"Glamour, then."<br/><br/>"Can’t Glamour a Beltane fire, Draco."<br/><br/>"Can, Harry. Watch me."<br/><br/>"Oh, Merlin! Draco, you berk! Hagrid will notice—or the Centaurs."<br/><br/>"The Centaurs know full well what we’re doing and Hagrid’s asleep—in every single Concatenation Hermione and I can calculate. I administer the Draught of Dreamless myself. I mean, I did. Last time. And the time before that."<br/><br/>"Well, alright then," Harry grumbled, "Though you could’ve mentioned it earlier."<br/><br/>"I thought you’d know, Harry. You should know. This can’t go bollocks-up now. We’re too close."<br/><br/>"Ready for the seeds, then? It’s high enough now, Draco."<br/><br/>"Yes. And one by one only, remember? Let the first burn up and then—"<br/><br/>"I know. Not a dummy."<br/><br/>"Not at all—just always in a tearing hurry, Harry."<br/><br/>"We can adjust it, a bit. After."<br/><br/>"No doubt we will."<br/><br/>"Wanker."<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Mulberry</b></span><br/><br/>When Gin did it, it was cool and clean. Holding hands over the kitchen table, their third (unexpected!) child a six month swell in Demeter’s belly, and Gin still sylph-like and brilliant, even with her colours muted.<br/><br/>"Harry, it’s over. I know that’s the last words you want to hear, but it is, Harry."<br/><br/>"Why?" To give him credit, he didn’t howl; he only tightened his grip on her slim hand enough to crack the fragile bones (heard a snap and saw Ginny’s wince, though she said not a word about it).<br/><br/>"It’s not enough, Harry. This is not enough. Not for me, not for you—and don’t think for a moment I don’t know, Harry, because I do. It’s over. We need—we need to stop."<br/><br/>"And the children?" Harry waved a hand in the air, felt as though it would fly away, as he would, all disarticulated and unbound. Unraveling rapidly, as if Ginny’s hands had been the ones to keep him neat and tidy, a ball of twine in a neat compartment marked husband—brother-in-law—father.<br/><br/>But not lover. No, never that. Not for an age, and then maybe never.<br/><br/>He loosened his fingers. She was absolutely right, and it was better clean and better bloodless and now, when he trod the halls of the Ministry he’d be able to meet those eyes that tracked after him.<br/><br/>"The children will be fine. They’re young, and this is hardly unusual. The Wizarding world’s no more about fidelity and endurance than the Muggle, Harry."<br/><br/>"Alright." It was grudging, more because she’d beat him to it, the grand gesture, and he’d been stewing for months over it—what to say, what to do—how to put it. And then their little ‘surprise’, Ginny months along after the last fateful Ministry do—and that had tabled all Harry’s good intentions in a flash. What kind of father abandoned an unborn child? Not he—not Harry Potter.<br/><br/>What sort of man gave up love for duty?<br/><br/>"Harry? Are you even listening?"<br/><br/>Ginny had been speaking, hasn’t she? Nattering on about Molly and Arthur, about the shock and how they’d grow used to it; about Ron and Hermione and how they were an aberration, really, and this would be yet another nine day’s wonder in the papers, but it would be alright. It would sort itself out, and he’d be advised to get off his arse and do something about that damned Malfoy, as no way was Ginny willing to go through all this and then sit back and watch him rot, caught in inertia, and did Harry even realize it had been ages, absolute ages, since they’d really even sat down to talk?<br/><br/>"I don’t," he murmured, staring at ‘their’ kitchen table. "I don’t…understand. Not really, Gin. I…just don’t."<br/><br/>"Harry!"<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Crabapples, Gathered by the Hands of A Virgin</b></span><br/><br/>"Dad-dy! Daddy, here! And here and here and <em>here</em>! For you, Daddy! ‘Cause you’re the bestest Daddy, ever!"<br/><br/>"Thank you, sweetheart; they’re lovely. I’ll keep them safe for you, don’t worry."<br/><br/>"Thank you, Daddy!" the little piping voice carried; Lily herself was already well up an ancient gnarled tree, laden with yet more of the tiny apples.<br/><br/>Harry watched her from the bench in the back garden. He was in a bower of the abundance of an early spring: buds and blooms and last year’s acorns, forgotten gourds, half-rotting, spilling seeds like guts…and crabapples, tiny, hard as stone green balls, wreathed by delicate flowers—little stars.<br/><br/>Sighing, he dug the locket he’d taken to wearing out from under his button-up woolen cardigan and Pendleton plaid wool shirt; spring was a chilly prospect, even in a magically maintained garden. Snapped the finely crafted silver oval open with a wry grimace, for he knew what to expect.<br/><br/>Black eyes, snapping with anger, regarded him levelly; two locks of hair, safely affixed to the other empty portrait space, fluttered in the cool breeze, Evans red and…a sooty, raven’s-wing black. But not his hair, though the colour was similar. Not <em>his</em> hair, a’tall.<br/><br/>That, however, was a matter for another day.<br/><br/>"Yes?" the well-known voice demanded acerbically. "Potter? You dare disturb me yet again? Cut up my peace with your mundane little quibbles? Well---what <em>now</em>, you blundering dolt? Forget your Arithmetric Tables and in need of a portable cheat? Can’t remember Levicorpus, all the sudden? What is it exactly you require, Mr. Potter? For I haven’t all day to wait about for you."<br/><br/>"Git," Harry frowned, but it was more in question than any lingering ire. It wasn’t as though he weren’t very familiar with the moods of the man in the tiny portrait. Severus Snape had had this tiny image painted just shy, perhaps, of Harry’s sixteenth birthday…or possibly a bit earlier, before Sirius had died. He was exactly the Snape Harry remembered from all those years of Potions, and not the Snape he had seen in his last, fateful nightmares, or on the final day. No, this Snape was still full-power to the force of ten, chock full of greasy, big-nosed gitdom, piss and vinegar. This Snape was his ‘pocket monster’, or so James, that lover of all things Muggle, loved to call him.<br/><br/>"Question."<br/><br/>"Yes?" Snape narrowed his gaze to slits. "When ever is it not? And? Get <em>on</em> with it, Potter. I was napping."<br/><br/>"Lily’s just brought me crabapples, from the trees Godric may’ve planted. Will that work, d’you think?"<br/><br/>"Hmmm…hands of a virgin, of course," Snape tapped his chin thoughtfully. "She <em>is</em> just on six, your daughter?"<br/><br/>"Mmm," Harry nodded.<br/><br/>"Well, then, yes, Potter. Preserve them, then, in a vacuum seal and hurry up about it; the touch is the crucial aspect! Bustle about!"<br/><br/>Harry grinned at him, unfazed. "Thought so. Ta, Snape!"<br/><br/>He snapped the locket shut on a tiny snarl that floated out: "<em>Don’t</em> bother yourself to issue a single word of thanks, Potter! It’s not as though I <em>expect</em> it--!"<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Peaseblossom</b></span><br/><br/>"Alright. Hermione, I think this is it."<br/><br/>"I should hope so. He’s been popping in and out of that portrait he willed me every hour on the hour, irksome man! Where has Draco been, for that matter? Harry?"<br/><br/>"Busy." He tried for offhand—failed miserably.<br/><br/>"Oh—right. Sure, Harry, ‘busy’. You’ve fought again, haven’t you?"<br/><br/>"We fight all the time, Hermione."<br/><br/>"No, I meant. But…well, Harry."<br/><br/>"Don’t have a fit over it, Hermione. He’s a grown man; he knows where to find me."<br/><br/>"You fight too much for it to be healthy, Harry, you and Draco."<br/><br/>"Pot, kettle, Mrs. Weasley. Ron is hardly the soul of discretion. I’ve heard some stories…"<br/><br/>"…Point, you arse."<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Potash</b></span><br/><br/>"I can’t speak with you, Potter," Draco dismissed him, there in the hallway outside the Wizengamot Meeting Room. "You’ve done your good deed; now, be on your way."<br/><br/>"Did you expect an apology, then? ‘Cause you’re damned well not getting one, arse! You’re the one who clammed up, Draco! You’re the one who wouldn’t talk to me!" Harry was seething; his cells sparked with it. But he felt good again, alive again, and that was what was important.<br/><br/>"I had a reason, Potter!" The narrow nostrils flared; blond strands were tossed out of eyes peremptorily. Draco shook his head at him and hissed. "I had the very best of reasons, you interfering snot, and I’d thank you to take yourself off now. I must return home."<br/><br/>"That’s not home, Draco. You’ll never live there again, mark my words," Harry insisted. "You’ve too many memories."<br/><br/>"I will so, Potter, and it’s no business of yours. Now, out of my way, please. I’m late."<br/><br/>Harry stepped back, reluctantly, and allowed Draco his robe sleeve.<br/><br/>"This isn’t the end of it, you know," he remarked casually. "I’ll be on your doorstep before the week’s out, Draco, and you shan’t turn me away then! Your mother will be happy to see me!"<br/><br/>"I don’t know about that, Potter—and--and I don’t care, either!" Draco snorted, wrenching himself two steps towards the awaiting Floo. "I won’t be there, so camp out all you like, will you? I’ve better things to do than wait upon the likes of you."<br/><br/>"Wait!" Harry gulped. "What? What d’you mean, ‘you won’t be there’? Where are you going, prat? There’s nowhere—"<br/><br/>Draco tromped back to him; gathered up Harry’s lapels as he’d liked to do in the old days, back at school. Brought his pointy, handsome face in real close, so that all Harry could see was the dazzle of crystal-grey eyeballs, alight with…all manner of emotion.<br/><br/>"I will be attending university, Potter, and I will be pursuing a viable future. And you will be taking your sticky fingers out of my business," he sneered. "I won’t tolerate your meddling, damn your eyes, and I won’t participate in this circus you call your private life. I’m all for peace and quiet, nitwit, and I don’t need the bother! Now, ciao! I’ll see myself off, thanks."<br/><br/>"Draco!"<br/><br/>This wasn’t going at all as Harry had planned it.<br/><br/>"Draco!" he roared. The fire only snapped at him, flames merry on high. Green with the residue of potash.<br/><br/>Why did that blind-stupid-stubborn fucker insist on always leaving him? <em>Why</em>?</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Part the Fourth: Tanglewood Tree</h2></a>
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  <b>Part the Fourth: Tanglewood Tree</b>
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    <em>I'm walkin' down a bone-dry river, but the cool mirage runs true<br/>I'm bankin' on the fables of the far, far better things we do<br/>I'm livin' for the day of reck'nin, countin' down the hours<br/>I yearn away, I burn away, I turn away the fairest flower of love, 'cause darlin'…</em>
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</div><p><br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Orange Blossom</b></span><br/><br/>"Astoria Lucinda Greengrass, I do plight my troth to you, in marriage."<br/><br/>"Draco Lucius Malfoy," Tory whispered, frowning, "are you certain?" she hissed under the watching eyes of the attendant elder Wizard. "I do plight my troth in marriage," she went on, raising her voice.<br/><br/>"Of course I do!" Draco hissed in return, glaring. "It’s the only fucking way, Tory! Now, get on with it---and make sure to smile, at least, alright? This isn’t another funeral!"<br/><br/>"Yes, yes, I know, pinhead—and your Mum’s watching us like a bloody hawk."<br/><br/>"Baggage." He was fond, yes. But fond had not a thing on volcanic.<br/><br/>"Mummy’s boy," Tory shot back, her teeth white as her veil. "Now kiss me, prat, and remember your promise."<br/><br/>"With the powers invested in me by Merlin, Circe and the Great Mother, I do pronounce you both wedded," the attending Wizard intoned.<br/><br/>"Right-oh," Draco muttered, and pecked at Tory’s moist pink lips. Completely unappealing, those, but arsehole wasn’t here to be kissed, now was he?<br/><br/>No, the great Hero of the War, Harry Potter, wasn’t present. And if he’d dared show his face at the exclusive wedding of Greengrass and Malfoy, Draco would’ve hexed him to tatters.<br/><br/>After fucking him right through the plastered, white satin-bunting bedecked walls of the largest of the Malfoy ballrooms.<br/><br/>He would’ve.<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Juniper Berry, Pickled</b></span><br/><br/><em>"If you don’t set this right, Harry James Potter, it’s over!"</em><br/><br/>Draco’s divorce was but a week old. Scorpius had been gone off to Hogwarts for nearly all of nine months, now. He’d be returning, come June, to a Manor devoid of a mother figure, and splitting his time henceforth between two households.<br/><br/><em>"I’m already—"</em><br/><br/>Mead, wine and ale were Draco’s friends, for Potter was not. Potter was the greatest arse the world had ever known, green eyes and lovely hands notwithstanding. Cold, dry Potter, with his nods and his stealing, thieving sideways glances and the short, sharp official Memos that only barely acknowledged Draco’s continued existence on the planet. For his part, Draco had long suspected he was seriously going mad—had been mental since Harry dumped him for the Weasley chit, all those years ago.<br/><br/>No, wait, who’d dumped whom, precisely?<br/><br/><em>"I can’t possibly—"</em><br/><br/>It was all a blur, now. How had it happened, anyway? He didn’t want to think too closely on it. He couldn’t. They’d been—he’d thought. And then it was over, and Potter was back to being the enemy and Draco was caught, between the hardest of rocks and blank walls. Parents threatened, his own life threatened, or fix a bloody cabinet and off his Headmaster.<br/><br/>Oh, yes, what an ethical and moral battle that had been.<br/><br/><em>"Seriously, Harry. This is far too close! I hate it—I feel like shite on two legs and the kids are completely screwed up!"</em><br/><br/>This is what came of doing things by half-measures. It was payback for every crack about orphans and ill-suited clothes; it was karma and hubris and the shoving up Draco’s nose of every single badge, every taunt, every insult by the tenfolds and twenties. It was what he deserved for having a temper; for not cornering Harry on the damned Express and revealing all.<br/><br/>For believing he alone could handle the pressure exerted by a mad Wizard, who held almost all the things he’d held dear within the tips of his bony fingers and squeezed at them like mad.<br/><br/>He’d been such a fool, back then. Such a hot-headed fool. Half off his mind and stupid.<br/><br/><em>"But why does it revert like this? That’s what I don’t understand, Draco. It shouldn’t be altering back to that original timeline. We’ve every reasonable barrier in place to prevent it. And it’s been fudged with so many times already—shouldn’t even exist, that!"<br/><br/>"Must be a strong current—but we’re the stronger, Harry. We are, damn it. Keep going then. Here’s the oak kindling. And the dried grasses."<br/><br/>"Thanks, Draco. I hope…I just hope." Harry stopped and stared bleakly at the pile of ingredients set before them. The moonlight revealed a miscellany of items: half a Potions Supply shoppe’s wares and the makings of a small bonfire.<br/><br/>"I know, Harry. Please keep hoping, alright? We’ll manage it this time; I’m sure of it."<br/><br/>He dropped a kiss on that lean tanned cheek as he leant over to set down the scale measure. That scent alone, the one that clung to Harry in sleep and waking, in bed and after a bath—that alone was worth every moment of anxiety.<br/><br/>Draco wouldn’t give this up, not for anything.<br/><br/>Not for anything.</em><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Chrysanthemum</b></span><br/><br/>The bastard. He’d not seen Potter since the Ministry Incident, a week after the boys had gone off on the Express. Not even at Christmas, when Albus Severus Potter came to stay. He was dropped off by his mother, the wretched Ginevra, and retrieved by his uncle, the rather terrifying George. When Scorp had been invited to the Potters at Easter, the invite Owl had been penned by that same Ginny Potter and it had been Arthur Weasley who’d met Draco and Scorpius on Potter’s front stoop.<br/><br/>Not a glimpse; not a hair; not a sign. It was a desert and an arid one Draco dwelt in. Severus took great pleasure in saying ‘I told you so," too. Charmed portraits were all very well, but they shouldn’t be allowed to dole out advice on the matters of the heart. At least Snape shouldn’t; look at his track record.<br/><br/>"Give it up, Draco," Snape had sneered. "You know Potter’s never coming back to you. He’s living the dream---just like his wretched parents. You’ve not a hope in hell of this ever working out."<br/><br/>But he’d clung, Draco had, to faint hope. There was something, something…he couldn’t quite recall, but it was dreadfully important and it involved fire and Potter and the scent of olive branches burning.<br/><br/>The scent of sex in the woods, in the heather. The slime of saliva across throats and panting hard in someone’s ear because one was so overwhelmed simply to be there, with that one particular person.<br/><br/>The sense of comfort. Like one of Potter’s old trainers, the kind he tripped over constantly because Potter insisted on dumping them off in the hall, every which way, and the elves could never keep up with the git—and why the bloody <em>fuck</em> was Draco remembering events that had never happened?<br/><br/>History that <em>wasn’t</em>, clearly?<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Lily-of-the-Valley Oil</b></span><br/><br/>"What are you on about, Potter?"<br/><br/>"I’ve sorted it, Draco. We’ve sorted it, Snape and I! And don’t address me as Potter—not now. Here, take my hand."<br/><br/>"What? I’m stirring, Harry! This is the crucial part! I can’t stop!"<br/><br/>"You must. This is more important, Draco. There’s something we’re missing; we’ve been missing, all along. We’ve been trying to bandage up the cracks but that’s not it!"<br/><br/>"What’s not it? Are you saying Severus’s Potion is incorrect somehow, Harry? Because it isn’t—we know it isn’t. It’s been working, for fuck’s sake, Harry!"<br/><br/>"No—not that. Give me your hand, m’love. Right now. Come away from there and give me your hand. And close your eyes if you need to. It might help."<br/><br/>There was a pause, whilst Draco Malfoy stared at his wand and the hand that moved it, in a timed, regular counterclockwise motion. Blinked, swallowed and dropped it. Rose up from his haunches and edged carefully round the cast-iron tripod that held the silver cauldron on the very edge of their small Beltane fire.<br/><br/>Their fourth Beltane fire. Where was Janus’s fabled smile?<br/><br/>"Right, okay, Harry." He held out his hand and Harry grasped it, tugging, so that they were right up close to one another, hip to hip. Swallowed and watched his lover’s face sideways. The light flickered to limn it a saturnine dark, casting shadows and heightening the effect of those black brows, the set of those lips. Harry Potter, at age forty, was no longer a boy. Hadn’t been a boy for a very long time, but still Draco looked for the signs of him. The young Potter, the imbecile, oblivious, curious Potter, from long ago, who didn’t know when to halt or be cautious. "Here, then, if you want it so much. I hope—" He swallowed and swallowed, his throat tight, because of course now was the worst possible of times to stop his constant stirring. "I hope you know what you’re doing. I trust you know what you’re doing, because—because."<br/><br/>Harry chuckled, and the sound of it drove Draco to cling yet more tightly to the broad square of flesh taut over bone he gripped so hard already. "I don’t, actually, but I’ve got this feeling," he patted his middle, "right here in my gut. So, er—close your eyes, then. This is going to be a bit of a shock, the heat. And don’t let go, alright?"<br/><br/>"Harry?" Draco’s eyes rolled, enough for the whites of them to show plainly in the uneven light. "What, exactly are you—we—doing now? Tell me!"<br/><br/>"Trust me, lover. Trust me," Harry murmured, and stepped forward, dragging Draco along with him, close enough to the licking hungry gouts of flame for his boots to heat up uncomfortably. Draco considered shuffling back in that split-second, but didn’t…thankfully.<br/><br/>"Harry!?" Thankfully, because he’d have fallen flat on his face in the midst of their bonfire if he had. "What the fuck, Harry!?"<br/><br/>"It’s alright, Draco," Harry soothed, blinking, and surveyed their position. "We’re alright, I think. Finally."<br/><br/>If one thought in terms of Floo fires, this was nothing, Draco thought. He’d stepped through a Floo more times than he could count. Magical fire, and harmless, and no more than a medium of transport. He’d survived Fiendfyre, even.<br/><br/>This was nothing. And if it wasn’t nothing, he’d murder Harry alive in the next incarnation and that was a promise, not a threat.<br/><br/>"Right," he sighed. "Right, then."<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Diamond Dust</b></span><br/><br/>"Gin, would you like to get married?" Harry had asked her. He’d been fiddling with that new wand of his and he seemed horribly shy and uncertain.<br/><br/>It was the height of midsummer following the last Battle, and Ginny Weasley had been sure of what she wanted for almost a decade by then. She said ‘Yes!’<br/><br/>It was Neville Longbottom’s face when he learnt of it—the set of his shoulders as he squared them—that caused her to say ‘No!’, just as resoundingly, a month after accepting.<br/><br/>It was her Mum’s rather severe talking-to that had her reconsidering, over Harry. Harry, who was a Weasley in all but blood and name. Harry…who wanted certain things; had dreams he dreamt, over and over. In a month she’d changed her answer to ‘Maybe…’<br/><br/>One year later they married. Civil service; no Press allowed.<br/><br/>A year after that James was born. Then Albus. Then Lily.<br/><br/>The divorce was friendly, all ‘round. Harry attended her almost immediate remarriage—to Neville Longbottom, the ‘other best man’ at Ginny’s first wedding.<br/><br/>Very civil, really. But Draco Malfoy and Astoria Greengrass still trumped them all in sheer style. Word on the Alley was they’d had Goblin-devised prenups and a full post-divorce reception, no expense spared, the toffee-nosed sods.<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Snapdragon</b></span><br/><br/>"See? Everything’s fine—we’ve not been burnt to a crisp yet." Harry nodded, and brought his gaze back to meet Draco’s. "And somehow, I don’t think we’re likely to be, either."<br/><br/>"So you say, Harry," Draco grumbled, and tightened his fingers. "So, why, exactly, are we standing in the middle of a bonfire, Harry? What’s the good of it?"<br/><br/>From the perspective of one who’d nearly been burnt to death; who survived only because of the man at his side, Draco thought of fire. Hot, cruel tongues of it, consuming him, and him helpless before it. Choking, and as doomed to die as any Muggle suddenly confronted with the fearful, mind-boggling horror that was Voldemort had ever been.<br/><br/>He was Charity Burbage and here was Nagini, wrought of fire.<br/><br/>And there was <em>heat</em>; never doubt it. He could feel it, embracing his legs and hips, and warming the fabric he wore to an uncomfortably steamy degree. He was sweating profusely, half from heat, half from fear, and even as he realized that, he could feel his damp fingers slipping.<br/><br/>"Draco, no!" Harry crowded closer to him, till they were tight up against each other. "Don’t let go!"<br/><br/>"Harry?" He clung, as he’d not managed to in twenty plus years, digging in the rounds of his perfectly smooth nails, nearly punctured the calloused skin and the soft skin, the curious mix that made up Harry’s hand. "Why? What’s going on? What are you <em>doing</em>?"<br/><br/>"It’s magic, Draco," Harry whispered, having shifted himself about somehow, so that Draco’s hand was held by both of his, and then twisting a bit more right after and yanking on Draco’s arm, and they were left facing each other, nose to nose, or nearly, for of course Harry didn’t have that inch or so that allowed Draco to rest his chin on Harry’s mop when he was wearing the right boots, the ones with the slightly elevated heel—and what the fuck was the idiot <em>thinking</em>, at a time like this?<br/><br/>"Pure magic." Harry closed his eyes, and looking as though he was practically ready to hum from happiness.<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Ochre, Umber and Boot Blacking, A Smidgeon Each</b></span><br/><br/>"Don’t you realize, fool?" Snape had confronted Harry the moment he’d entered the small room he’d claimed for himself in the rebuilt Godric’s Hollow cottage. "You only are given a few chances, Potter—and you’re wasting them!"<br/><br/>Harry threw his body on the long battered leather sofa. He’d slept here more nights than he could count; both of Ginny’s pregnancies had been difficult. This most recent one was no different. How long had it been since he’d got off? How long had it been since he’d got off with the one person who made his blood boil—his heart soar?<br/><br/>"It’s no use," he sighed, tired, and attempted to shut out that annoying deep rich voice—the one that tempted him away from his squeaky clean present.<br/><br/>What were these dreams—what had they been, once? He remembered…he recalled.<br/><br/>"You know you will, though," Snape murmured. Harry, eyes closed, could hear the smirking smile. "You know you will, Potter. Cease this stalling."<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Heat Source: Flames, Set to Simmer</b></span><br/><br/>"Magic?" Draco squeaked—croaked, rather, on a coughing gasp. This was—the more he thought about it—purely mad, to stand still in the heart of a fire. Which was indeed curling up the leather of his boot tips and gnawing away at his cloak. "What magic, Harry? What the fuck are we doing?"<br/><br/>Harry opened his eyes, and then raised one hand to remove the spectacles that glinted in the red light and fragrant smoky haze that surrounded them, eating away at their oxygen. He tucked them away, calmly as he pleased, and used that hand to take hold of Draco’s other. It was fisted and tight within his fingers, and uncurled only very reluctantly. Draco’s trousers were smoking, and the heat building in his crotch wasn’t lust.<br/><br/>"Harry! Harry, we have to get out of this!" he cried out, and made an abortive attempt to pull them both back, to safety. This was Harry going spare, he was convinced of it. All those years, spent patching here and tweaking here, mending little bits of reality, bending it. Harry had finally lost his mind, or at least his better judgment, and it was up to Draco to get them to safety after this mental start of Harry’s.<br/><br/>They could try again, next year. It would be awful in the meantime. He’d be alone, as he’d been so many times before, during the gap years. Those times that had been unavoidable, when they’d chosen, consciously, to exist without each other—chosen! His mind flinched away from the thought.<br/><br/>As if he’d ever wish that on anyone, or choose it, even Potter when he was at his most furious with him. When he’d thought he’d been abandoned, when he’d married poor Astoria in a fit of bitter rage, doing as he supposed to, for hadn’t Potter just left him? Walked away to the safety of the Weasels; given up on what they had?<br/><br/>All those years—all that time, spent alone, watching Harry in the hallways of the Ministry. Catching glimpses of him as he went about his business: Perfect Potter, father of three, happily married. Perfect Potter, who so clearly wanted nothing to do with Draco.<br/><br/>That was everything he’d never choose, that.<br/><br/>The flames were waist-high, and Draco closed his eyes in despair. He couldn’t shift him; Harry was too heavy, and he daren’t let go of Harry’s hand to gain a better grip.<br/><br/>"Harry…Harry, I hope to everything that’s holy you know what you’re doing," he sighed, and resigned himself to dying in fire. Or at least…to—what? Was this a test—some sort of final ritual?<br/><br/>"It’s magic, Draco; trust me, please?" Harry pleaded, and somehow wedged himself between Draco’s taut arms, never letting go for an instant. "It’s the key—it’s what we’ve forgotten; overlooked, rather, all these years. Stay, will you? With me?"<br/><br/>"Yes," Draco didn’t hesitate. He only knew he’d not struggle, not if this was what Harry wanted of him. Whatever it might be, and he didn’t need to know what that was, either. "Yes, Harry. I’ll…stay. I’ll not leave you, you arse."<br/><br/>The flames, hearing perhaps, or so Draco fancied, his mind fogged with what was rapidly becoming painful heat and the tendrils of a muggy, oily smoke, roared higher. He could see Harry’s dear face though the slits he’d made his eyes, blinking his lashes rapidly as the acrid heat lashed at them. Clean and beautiful, imperfect and raw, that was Harry—his Harry. Insolent, likely ruddy insane, especially when he’d an idea stuck in his head—determined.<br/><br/>Not moving, though Draco could easily ascertain he wasn’t alone in the clawing grasp of the fire. It had built to shoulder-height, and the logs and twigs he balanced upon were crumbling to grey ash and soot beneath his crispy-hot toes. He was—and he only risked a glance to confirm this—barefoot, the Beltane bonfire having consumed his shoes.<br/><br/>"Harry—"<br/><br/>"Hmmm?" Harry’s hands tightened, and he smiled, that wry little lift of lips Draco adored, "what, Draco?"<br/><br/>"Harry, if whatever it is you think you’re—<em>we’re</em>—doing doesn’t work and we survive anyway, will you—?"<br/><br/>"Will I what, luv? And it’s not much longer now—just hold on, Draco," Harry sounded so assured, even with his trainers up in smoke and his cloak billowing with the stuff. Draco nearly shut his eyes—he wasn’t sure that he could bear what was coming. Not watching it, without shifting—stone still in the center of a ruddy horrendous death.<br/><br/>The heat caught at his straining lungs as he drew breath. Olive wood and pomegranate; myrrh and thyme and verbena. Rosemary, fresh and dried, and strewed across the rising sparks as if to flavour them where they roasted.<br/><br/>"If," he gulped, "you make it out—come to your fucking senses and get your arse out of this, Harry—then will you—will we…try again? Next year?"<br/><br/>Harry’s eyes went wide at that. Draco was almost thrown off his pins by the gale force of black velvet, ringed with a burning green—a green unlike any he’d ever seen Harry sport. This was the exact way Harry’s eyes went when they shagged, only more so: this midnight sooty bloom of depthless pupil, surrounded by a crackle of golden-veined green. Green like ivy; green like moss—green as the leaves of the hawthorn and the blood of a dragon’s heart.<br/><br/>He laughed, the git—threw his shaggy head back and laughed his arse off, the little prick, and it was all Draco could do not to hit him. Strike him hard, for making light of what was likely their deaths in this sodding pyre (his hair was blackening on the very tips, and he—he was naked, as stripped of all his ceremonial garb as stupid Harry was, and covered in a sheen of slick sweat). Making it all out as nothing, this ritual—or rite—or whatever maggot it was Harry’d got stuck in his sodding brain.<br/><br/>Death by sodding fire? Ridiculous! They’d cheated that, the both of them, and come out…not unscathed, perhaps, but grateful.<br/><br/>He’d been grateful, at least. And more.<br/><br/>But he needed to know. Another year spent alone…maybe death was actually preferable.<br/><br/>"Harry?" he whispered, but Harry was humming, still, a nasal drone that slid in between the pop of sparks flying as they lit on his back and shoulder; the hiss of damp young wood catching.<br/><br/>He closed his terribly dry eyes for a moment, ignoring the caress of red-gold across his bared skin. Cloak was gone; robes, too. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t smell that godsawful stench of burning flesh yet—surely his hair would be a solid sheet of unquenchable flame any moment now, <em>surely</em>? Closed his eyes, remembering.<br/><br/>Couldn’t bear to watch what the flames were enacting on Harry—his love, his only love.<br/><br/>Feast and famine; wanted—not wanted. Working together, or standing stonily apart. Following Harry with his eyes and his wretchedly lonely heart when he couldn’t—daren’t follow after with his hungry body. Wanting Harry, any way he could get him—friend, enemy, work mate—partner.<br/><br/>Any way, any way at all. Even hatred had been preferable to indifference.<br/><br/>He opened them just as quickly, blinking against swirling ash, to see only green eyes and the faint glimmer of lips moving below them. It was over, he thought. It had come down to this, and he wondered rather airily all of a sudden what the children would say when the Aurors contacted them. What Hermione would shriek, when she’d heard they’d been fools and worse, foolish—or maybe that would be dear old Severus, safe enough in his unscorched frame.<br/><br/>He peered closely: Harry <em>was</em> mouthing something. Some small gout of words, short and lacking breath to fuel them. Draco echoed them, fiercely, because this was likely the last chance he’d have to say them in this life, and he wasn’t letting go, not for anything—not even to brush that smoking curl of hair off Harry’s sooty forehead—not even.<br/><br/>"I love you," he growled. "I love you, Harry," he stated, and it was the last clean breath of air in his heat-wracked body. "I love you, you little sod, and you’d better be waiting for me, on the other—"<br/><br/>"I love you, Draco Malfoy," Harry whispered—chanted, mayhap—and was that the incantation, so simple? Said it again, in that husky way he had, which melted Draco into puddles and left him boneless with love: "I love you. I’ll always love you, and I’d die to be with you—here and now, and—and forever after--"<br/><br/>"No! No, don’t, Harry!" Draco burst out and wished with all his might Harry had not commanded the impossible—asked for it, in just that way he had, the one that would have Draco tossing his heart before windmills in any life they lived. "No—you should—we could still—"<br/><br/>"I love you, Draco." Fingers only tightened; neither budged an inch in the pyre of them.<br/><br/>"I…love you, Harry. And don’t think I’m not going to get you for this, because—because! I love you!"<br/><br/>And that was it. Black, dark, a curtain falling with a sodden velvet thud. Didn’t even have much of a chance to recall the last time they made love—last week, yesterday, last night or last year?<br/><br/>Didn’t matter, much, Draco supposed. Not now.<br/><br/>He didn’t dare let go, even as every cell in his body shrieked for it. <em>Run, Draco</em>!<br/><br/><em>No</em>.<br/><br/>All over, and Draco’s last conscious thought was of Scorpius, shaking his head over it, and of Harry—at eleven—at fourteen—at seventeen—at twenty. Walking away, running back, in his arms and out of them. At thirty and forty and he’d hoped for all time to come, for every morning when he opened his eyes, and every evening when he poured his weary body into bed.<br/><br/>"Harry." It was everything, that word. All his whole life, in two syllables.<br/><br/>"Dra…co!" Harry gasped, and that was the last sound Draco heard with conscious ears.<br/><br/>And the Beltane Fire blinked out as he fell, knees buckling at last, far too heavy even as his skin felt as though it was peeling off him in strips. <em>They</em> fell, still handfasted, and were burnt up, on the spiked points of twiggy regret and the heavy heaped logs of expectations.<br/><br/>Burnt up.<br/><br/>Extinguished.<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Willow</b></span><br/><br/>"Harry?"<br/><br/>"Hmmm?"<br/><br/>"Listen, I…I, er, was thinking."<br/><br/>"Yes, Gin?"<br/><br/>"Maybe…maybe this isn’t such a good idea, you know? Mum’s all for it, I know, but…we’re awfully young, Harry. Is this what you really want?"<br/><br/>Harry blinked at her across the table at the restored and reopened Fortesque’s. They’d been sharing a malted ice and Ginny had been staring at him funny for a good half hour now.<br/><br/>"Er…what d’you mean, exactly—‘is this what I want’?"<br/><br/>"Well, the marriage thing, Harry, obviously!" Ginny shook her bright head at him impatiently. "What Mum’s been pushing for months now, berk—don’t tell me you’ve not noticed it? She’s like a pianola, always crashing down on our heads about it."<br/><br/>"Oh," Harry nodded. "That."<br/><br/>"Yes, that." Ginny snickered. "Really, Harry. That’s not very flattering, is it?"<br/><br/>"Er, what?"<br/><br/>"Never mind. Tell me, boyo, what d’you think of the ‘that’? Did you have dreams of white dresses and wedding cakes too, like Mum? Or are you more like me, and think this is a bit foolish, rushing somewhere we don’t have to go, necessarily."<br/><br/>"Ah!" Harry eyebrows soared. "Right, right—now I’m in the swim, I think--"<br/><br/>"Good-oh."<br/><br/>"Thanks for that. Um. No."<br/><br/>"NO?"<br/><br/>"No. It’s too soon, We’ve just—"<br/><br/>"That’s precisely what I think, but if you listen to Mum, it’ll be the end of the world if we all don’t run out, hitch ourselves up and get to procreation! I’m so glad you—"<br/><br/>"Well…about that bit," Harry tilted his head inquisitively. "I was thinking…if you wouldn’t mind…and of course we can do this magically—"<br/><br/>"Spit it out, Potter," Ginny grinned, and Harry was struck by the resemblance to Draco. They must’ve been palling around again, the two of them. He’d have to keep a strict eye on that nonsense. A ginger-haired Draco-clone was absolutely not what was needed!<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Rubies</b></span><br/><br/>"Stupid brat, Potter. Open your stupid mouth, you twat! Here---drink what Granger’s offering you! Do you some good, stupid!"<br/><br/>That was Snape’s voice, a whiplash of old, and Draco came to, blinking, to see Poppy Pomfrey and Granger on either side of the cot next to his. Why Severus had been reduced to using the word ‘stupid’ repeatedly, when his vocabulary of insult was a rich and vast one, Draco couldn’t fathom.<br/><br/>Something must be terribly wrong.<br/><br/>And he--he was in the old Infirmary, and Harry was hacking away next to him like a TB victim, and the surprise of it had him choking and gasping in reaction.<br/><br/>Weren’t they dead? Last time he’d looked, they were dead. Nearly so, at least, and with no end in sight. No help for it.<br/><br/>"What—what the fuck?" he asked of the antiseptic air. "Potter?"<br/><br/>"Oh! Harry!" Hermione squealed. "Look who’s back with us again!" The goblet jerked in her hand and Draco could see Harry’s eyes go wide as it slopped down his gown.<br/><br/>"About time, I’d say," Snape grumbled from his station over the mantle. "Stupid recalcitrant little twat. Take your potion and be grateful for it, you little prick!"<br/><br/>Weasel tumbled through the room’s tiny hearth on a gust of sparks and came up tousled and ruddy-cheeked.<br/><br/>"Oi! Harry! Malfoy! They just Owled me—you alright, then? Where’s the fire, mate? What’s going on?"<br/><br/>"Now, Mr. Malfoy, you, too," Pomfrey bustled over, ably ignoring the hubbub, a goblet in hand. "Drink up; your throat’s likely still raw."<br/><br/>"Enough!" he shoved it away, sitting bolt upright and shoving his way out of bed. "<em>Enough</em>, I say. Take yourselves off, you lot—Madame Pomfrey, you too! I require a word with Potter, here."<br/><br/>"Oh-ho, <em>now</em> the brat twigs it," Snape sneered. "Took you long enough, godson."<br/><br/>"You, too, Severus!" Draco snarled, "or I’ll hex your painted nose with warts like you wouldn’t believe! Out! All of you—out!"<br/><br/>He stalked—best as he could, garbed in a hospital gown and with knees like rubberbands—over to the bedside of the miscreant and glared down at him.<br/><br/>"Um," Harry said, smiling up at him hopefully. "Hi?"<br/><br/>Draco growled.<br/><br/>Everyone else, even Snape, scuttled off. Vaguely, Draco heard the door slamming shut behind them and the swish of painted robes exiting the plain dark frame Severus preferred.<br/><br/>"Explain yourself, you imbecile! Why the fuck did we nearly die? What were you thinking?" he demanded, almost shrieking, his teeth so tight together they nearly cracked.<br/><br/>Harry blinked up at him, no specs on to hide his guileless gaze, not a wisp of a grin in sight. All gone, like magic.<br/><br/>"Oh, brilliant," he said instead. "Your hair’s alright. I admit I was just a little worried about that."<br/><br/>"Fuck my hair, Harry!" Draco yelled. "Explain yourself!"<br/><br/>He sat on the bed and grabbed Harry’s shoulders, hard and biting, and smiled at him in a very nasty way. "Explain yourself, you fucking annoying headstrong little prick, or I’ll skin you this time, truly and well—and fuck your contrary arse into this stupid cot when I’m done with murdering you!"<br/><br/>Harry grinned at him. The smile was returned, in all its saucy glory. "I could do that," he smiled. Blinked innocently as bleeding cherry pie and nodded, as if Draco had stopped by for tea and a friendly chat and wasn’t breathing fire and brimstone down the front of his flimsy, potion-soaked robe. "It’ll be sticky, though, after."<br/><br/>"What?"<br/><br/>"Your hair, Draco. If I come in it, it’ll be sticky."<br/><br/>"Ohmygods, Harry!" Draco didn’t even lift his hands; he merely shoved them behind Harry’s back and lifted him bodily off the massed pillows, gathering him close and then closer yet. "My gods, Harry! I thought I’d lost you, finally—I thought we’d die!"<br/><br/>"Oh, no," Harry’s voice was muffled by Draco’s shaking shoulder. "Not that. A little hotter than I expected, that whole experience, but I think it did the trick. Hermione was just telling me. She thinks so, too."<br/><br/>"What trick?" Draco howled. "What are you getting at, Harry?"<br/><br/>"It was trust, Draco," Harry replied, and snuggled his head in, shifting it sideways so his still-chapped lips brushed Draco’s damp neck. Damp from tears, because he was sobbing, great wracking sobs that he couldn’t control. "Just…trust. We’d forgotten, you know."<br/><br/>He’d not thought of anything like—been horribly, excruciatingly afraid, in place of thinking—worse even than the Fiendfyre, worse even than Harry walking away from him, down that goddamned bleak Ministry corridor—he’d thought only that it was truly ended. Extinguished, as they would surely be.<br/><br/>Had surely been. Perhaps, somewhere, somewhen, they <em>were</em>.<br/><br/>"Explain!" he gasped, and fought against the tears that wouldn’t stop and the snot clogging his nose. The hum of blood in his ears, that left his poor head spinning. "Please, oh please, Harry—explain!"<br/><br/>"All that time, y’see, we forgot something. The most important something, Draco," Harry said softly. He pressed a little kiss under Draco’s earlobe. "Why it ever happened in the first place—we forgot."<br/><br/>"What? What was that, you stupid arse? What was so important we had to nearly die to achieve it, Harry?"<br/><br/>Because he couldn’t get over it, how close they had come to losing it all. All the scraps of precious memory, all the shards of deserved pain, all his lovely life—their lives—they’d constructed, piecemeal and patchwork, in between times and around and behind times. His real life—the one he had with Harry.<br/><br/>"Just, just—why?" He couldn’t get close enough; would never be close enough. "Harry?"<br/><br/>"Trust," Harry whispered again, as if that one small word was sufficient.<br/><br/>"Trust?" Draco couldn’t quite believe it—did Harry think he was a fool? To be put off so easily? Complex magic; tricksy stuff, fiddling about with time, and Snape staring disapprovingly over their shoulders every time they did it.<br/><br/>Every time they were forced to, because it turned out Harry hadn’t been able to live either, not in a world that didn’t have Draco in it.<br/><br/>"Trust," he growled. "As if that were ever a question, you pinhead! Of course I trust you! I’ve always trusted you! I’ve <em>wanted</em> to trust to, you git, and I did!"<br/><br/>"And me you, Draco. But…we had to prove it. No one gets round the Goddess without a little bloodshed—or worse. And…we did. <em>We did</em>." Harry’s reedy whisper—the smoke must’ve damaged his lungs, which only had Draco holding him more closely—was triumphant. Gleeful.<br/><br/>"We did," he echoed flatly. "By being burnt to a crisp, Harry? That’s what it took?"<br/><br/>"We weren’t burnt, Draco," Harry chided, and yanked feebly at him, so that Draco found himself sliding and elbowing his way onto Harry’s narrow cot mattress. "And we didn’t die—obviously. But we did manage to reset the clock. The right way, finally. The way we should’ve done, from the start."<br/><br/>"The children? Harry, the <em>children</em>!" Draco almost bolted for the Floo right then and there. Scorpius! His son! And his son’s child, on its way, carried in the belly of Pansy Zabini—ohmygods! "They’re—they’re?"<br/><br/>"Draco."<br/><br/>"Harry!" He was hyperventilating and Harry, the little prick, was patting away at his taut spinal cord, as if he were all of three years of age and suffering from the aftereffects of a nightmare and Harry was playing Mumsy and—and—<br/><br/>"All’s well, Draco—everyone’s here, everyone’s as they should be. We didn’t lose anything, not this time. And—and this is the best thing, Draco!—we won’t. We won’t. It’s done."<br/><br/>"Done?" Draco blinked away tears of relief, rubbed his drippy nose against Harry’s comforting shoulder. He’d collapsed there, finally. Gratefully. It was never so good as to be home. "How d’you mean, done?"<br/><br/>"You never let me go, did you? And I didn’t let you go, either?" Harry asked him, and it must be rhetorically, because how could he have? Couldn’t even imagine it, leaving Harry go.<br/><br/>"Idiot," he snorted, snuffily, wishing heartily for a handkerchief, and then Charming one into existence, as a muzzy afterthought. "As if I would!"<br/><br/>"That was it, you get it? The key. The missing ingredient—the one even Severus didn’t know existed. Trust."<br/><br/>"Bullshit, Harry!" That almost had him sitting up again, but this was too comfortable. Still, he could object safely enough from the warmth of Harry’s embrace. "I’ve trusted you all along, Harry. Don’t say I haven’t!"<br/><br/>"No, you didn’t, Draco. And neither did I, for the longest while," Harry replied, matter-of-factly. "There was no reason we should, really—and you’re mixing things up, you know."<br/><br/>"I am not!" Draco bit him—well, just a nibble, really, but Harry’s neck was salty and he craved the salt. He must be very dehydrated, still. "I’ve always kept all the strands of this stupid tangle clear in my mind, Harry. I was the one who figured it out in the first place, wasn’t I? I made charts!"<br/><br/>"Not saying you weren’t, prat, " Harry replied comfortable. "Only that we both forgot—and we were both influenced by everything that should have happened—and what did and what didn’t. Couldn’t help ourselves, likely. But, no—trust was still the key to it."<br/><br/>"How?" Draco demanded, and let himself slide into a comfortable heap. He was horny, but he was also immensely tired. "How so, berk? Explain yourself, as I keep asking you to."<br/><br/><br/><span class="u"><b>Platinum, One Half-Ounce</b></span><br/><br/>Ginny handed it over, without much ceremony. Harry gave it a little rub with the pad of his thumb, smiling down at it rather mysteriously.<br/><br/>"Here’s what’s left of it, Harry. Use it well, alright?"<br/><br/>Lily Luna yowled for the shiny. For it was brighter already; the platinum smooth, the smoky topaz faceted as glassy smooth as the day it had been cut.<br/><br/>"Bitch," Draco snipped, but he smiled. "It’s about time you gave that up—it was never yours to begin with."<br/><br/>"Don’t push me, berk," Ginny smirked cheerily, "or I’ll hex your bollocks blue for eternity."<br/><br/>"Git," Ron muttered, from Harry’s other side. "Are you certain about this, mate? Because there’s still time to change your mind."<br/><br/>"There’s no time to change it, Ron," Harry smiled mysteriously. "Not anymore. Time’s all past for that. Besides, I’m sure."<br/><br/>"Me, too, Weasel," Draco stuck his tongue out and wagged it. Tory giggled, and thus so did Scorp, captive in his magical stroller. She’d already returned hers and Draco had had it re-spelled and polished, and the centre stone reset with an emerald. He was prepared, as usual. He smirked, well aware it would infuriate the Trio. "Quite, quite sure, thanks for asking."<br/><br/>"So, er? Are you ready now?" Nev asked, his deep voice always a surprise when they recalled the weedy, overweight child. He wasn’t that now; far from it. Ginny had learnt to appreciate that, too. "May we get on with it, you two?"<br/><br/>"Please," huffed Hermione, and Snape—present in many different frames for the occasion—nodded with lips variously thin, smirking, tight and—miraculously--stretched wide over a brilliant smile.<br/><br/><em>That</em> was disconcerting.<br/><br/>"If you are indeed finished with this ridiculous quarrelling?"<br/><br/>They nodded, heads bobbing, even the little ones, and especially the serious young James, who openly adored the irascible Professor who inhabited Daddy’s study and whom Harry thought might one day might convince the Sorting Hat to jam a Potter into Slytherin House. Albus stuck his thumb in his mouth, wide-eyed; Lily yawned into her mother’s neck, on the verge of a sudden nap.<br/><br/>Snape, whom they had gathered ‘round this day, settled back into his Headmaster’s ornately carved armchair and ‘ahem’d’ discreetly. The locket version smirked, most horribly. And the young man, with his flowing dark locks and his sensitive black eyes, only looked to them tenderly.<br/><br/>It was that Snape Harry shared a quick grin with. It was the Headmaster who called him back to attention.<br/><br/>"Very well, then, as it cannot be avoided." Snape took a worthless breath, being nothing more than paint. "I, Severus Snape, extinct, but yet by the powers still invested in me as a Headmaster of Hogwarts, now pronounce you two rapscallions, you two horribly misguided young Wizards, fools and prats—"<br/><br/>"Snape!" Harry frowned at the version who sent him stags and willed him the future; interfering old git. Always had to have the last word on any subject. "Any day now, please?" Draco glared for all he was worth, taking Harry’s arm fiercely and tugging him closer.<br/><br/>Snape, however, persisted. Dryly, despite Ginny’s not-quite-stifled giggles and Neville’s pained look.<br/><br/>"…young Potter here being nominally the worst student I’ve ever the misfortune to suffer through instructing—excepting Mr Longbottom here, naturally," Snape continued, unfazed, "who was completely atrocious—"<br/><br/>Here Harry growled, audibly.<br/><br/>"And Mr Malfoy, son of my dear friend Narcissa and admittedly a phenom of sorts at Potions but lamentably a reprehensible suck-up, still, though accounted my very own godson—<em>I</em>, as Headmaster, do hereby countenance and legally allow these sadly foolish young men to be Bonded, hereafter, in perpetual matri—"<br/><br/><br/><b>Anacyclismus amatorium philtrum venenum</b></p>
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